DESH: Database evaluation system with hibernate ORM framework
Chitra Babu, G Gunasingh · 2016
Relational databases have been the predominant choice for back-ends in enterprise applications for several decades. JDBC — a Java API — that is used for developing such applications and persisting data on the back-end requires enormous time and effort. JDBC makes the application logic to become tightly coupled with the database and consequently is inadequate for building enterprise applications that need to adopt to dynamic requirements. Hence, ORM frameworks such as Hibernate, became prominent. However, even with ORM, the relational back-end often faces a drawback of lack of scalability and flexibility. In this context, NoSQL databases are increasingly gaining popularity. Existing research works have either benchmarked Hibernate with an RDBMS or with one of the NoSQL databases. However, it has not been attempted in the literature to test both an RDBMS and a NoSQL database for their performance within the context of a single application developed using the features of Hibernate. This kind of a study will provide an insight that using Hibernate ORM solution would help us to develop database-independent applications and how much performance gain can be achieved when an application is ported from an RDBMS back-end to a NoSQL database backend. The objective of this work is to develop a business application using Hibernate framework that can individually communicate with an RDBMS as well as a specific NoSQL database and to evaluate the performance of both these databases.