I am currently working on a project where I have to retrieve some rows from the database based on some filters (I also have to paginate them).
My solution was to make a function that generates the queries and to query the database directly (it works and it's fast)
When I presented this solution to the senior programmer he told me this is going to work but it's not a long-term solution and I should rather use Spring Specifications.
Now here comes my questions :
Why is Spring Specifications better than generating a query?
Is a query generated by Spring Specifications faster than a normal query?
Is it that big of a deal to use hard-coded queries ?
Is there a better approach to this problem ?
I have to mention that the tables in the database don't store a lot of data, the biggest one (which will be queried the least) has around 134.000 rows after 1 year since the application was launched.
The tables have indexes on the rows that we will use to filter.
A "function that generates the queries" sounds like building query strings by concatenating smaller parts based on conditions. Even presuming this is a JPQL query string and not a native SQL string that would be DB dependent, there are several problems:
you lose the IDEs help if you ever refactor your entities
not easy to modularize and reuse parts of the query generation logic (eg. if you want to extract a method that adds the same conditions to a bunch of different queries with different joins and aliases for the tables)
easy to break the syntax of the query by a typo (eg. "a=b" + "and c=d")
more difficult to debug
if your queries are native SQL then you also become dependent on a database (eg. maybe you want your integration tests to run on an in-memory DB while the production code is on a regular DB)
if in your project all the queries are generated in a way but yours is generated in a different way (without a good reason) then maintenance of the will be more difficult
JPA frameworks generate optimized queries for most common use cases, so generally speaking you'll get at least the same speed from a Specification query as you do from a native one. There are times when you need to write native SQL to further optimize a query but these are exceptional cases.
Yes, it's bad practice that makes maintenance a nightmare
I am Working on multiple database like MSSQL server and PostgreSQL with heavy transactions and complex queries. I have searched that simple jdbc is more faster then ORM. I was thinking of using ORM because I do not want to write different query for different database for same work, and also for standardized my dao layer. I am mapping my database tables without using foreign keys and for ORM like apache cayenne I have to map tables with foreign key constraint, so I can use my Joins or any other multiple table operations. Is it good to use and ORM or simple jdbc is fine.
From your problem dscription, you already have an understanding of the tradeoffs involved. So this is really a decision that you need to make for yourself based on those tradeoffs.
My only advice here will be to take a second look at performance requirements. While ORM does introduce an overhead of creating, storing and managing objects, in all but a few cases, you can safely ignore this overhead for the sake of a better abstraction. Also when working with JDBC very often you end up writing your own code to convert ResultSet to objects, which will encounter its own overhead. So you may not end up with faster code, while forfeiting all the benefits of a clean object model and a framework that manages it.
So my own preference is to go with a better abstraction (ORM in this case), and then use the framework tools for optimizing the performance. E.g. to speed up processing of large ResultSets Cayenne provides a few techniques: result iterators, DataRow queries, paginated queries, etc.
On the other hand I would use JDBC or something like MyBatis when it is not possible to cleanly model your data as entities. E.g. when there are no natural relationships, all access happens via stored procedures, etc. Doesn't seem like your case though.
What are the implications (on performance and other aspects) of having Rails Associations between ActiveRecord Models that are not mapped to a Database relationship
I have seen this in a real project and have searched for these implications without any luck
These are some of the documents I have found
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-railsn1/
May not be an answer but it would make for a long comment and may add value to the OP.
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe what the OP is getting at is that the code creates the relation but the database does not have a key relationship using foreign and primary keys inside the actual database. Since rails uses Object-Relational (ORM) structure instead of a Database-Relational structure.
Not sure if there are really any draw back implications (although I am sure many would disagree) and the second article seems to focus mostly on n+1 issues which you can resolve by writing appropriate code. Many n+1 issues spring out of code where people do not want to be explicit with their attribute selections and thus rails obliges by returning all attributes of a record. then when you request that objects relationship rails graciously runs another query for you and returns what you've asked for but when you are doing this in large iterations this can cause a large load and create performance issues.
You can avoid these issues by explicitly selecting exactly what you want by using select and group as well as using include or eager_load statements. Yes these are more complicated to write originally as many of them will require more SQL and less railsy syntax but the performance increase can be drastic when querying large tables or multiple relationships.
These are statements you would generally write by hand in stored-procedures or queries in SQL. Rails still gives you these freedoms but many times they are ignored because they look more like SQL than ruby and I have seen more than once people complaining about both the fact that if they change the DB they will have to change this too and that it "looks bad". Well if you were writing this from scratch in a standard database both these issues still apply.
As many have stated "ORM is just a tool" and any tool that is used improperly can have drastic implications. As long as you understand the tools you are using ORM can be very powerful and far more concise but if you ignore features your tool provides expect to have consequences with an extensive reach.
If you use a chainsaw as a hammer expect to lose an arm
UPDATE
I am unaware of any improvements in performance due to relationships inside the database other than it offers a hint as to where to index values. (You can create indexes during rails migrations although the primary ones are created for you the relational ones generally are not). Adding indexing to relational fields will generally speed up the database performance whether or not the specific relationship is actually defined in the database. Someone Asked a Similar Question
Database Relationships are more about Data Integrity than anything else and these issues should be handled inside your models in an ORM design not in the database its self.
Here is another resource to take a look at
And a few more SO questions on the subject
In SQL Server 2008, do relationships make queries faster?
Does Foreign Key improve query performance?
What's wrong with foreign keys?
Is there a severe performance hit for using Foreign Keys in SQL Server?
SQL Server Foreign Key constraint benefits
You get the idea just about asking the right question.
I have to make some filters, such as get persons who are in a given department, and I was wondering about the best way to do it.
Some of them are going to require the join of multiple tables.
Does anyone know about the main differences between CDbCriteria and Query Builder? I would particularly like to know about the compatibility with databases.
I found this in the Yii documentation about Query Builder:
It offers certain degree of DB abstraction, which simplifies migration to different DB platforms.
Is it the same for the CDbCriteria objects? Is it better?
The concept of CDbCriteria is used when working with Yii's active record (AR) abstraction (which is usually all of the time). AR requires that you have created models for the various tables in your database.
Query builder a very different way to access the database; in effect it is a structured wrapper that allows you to programmatically construct an SQL query instead of just writing it out as a string (as an added bonus it also offers a degree of database abstraction as you mention).
In a typical application there would be little to no need to use query builder because AR already provides a great deal of functionality and it also offers the same degree of database abstraction.
In some cases you might want to run a very specific type of query that is not convenient or performant to issue through AR. You then have two options:
If the query is fixed or almost fixed then you can simply issue it through DAO; in fact the query builder documentation mentions that "if your queries are simple, it is easier and faster to directly write SQL statements".
If the query needs to be dynamically constructed then query builder becomes a good fit for the job.
So as you can see, query builder is not all that useful most of the time. Only if you want to write very customized and at the same time dynamically constructed queries does it make sense to use it.
The example feature that you mention can and should be implemented using AR.
As someone who hasn't used either technology on real-world projects I wonder if anyone knows how these two complement each other and how much their functionalities overlap?
LINQ to SQL forces you to use the table-per-class pattern. The benefits of using this pattern are that it's quick and easy to implement and it takes very little effort to get your domain running based on an existing database structure. For simple applications, this is perfectly acceptable (and oftentimes even preferable), but for more complex applications devs will often suggest using a domain driven design pattern instead (which is what NHibernate facilitates).
The problem with the table-per-class pattern is that your database structure has a direct influence over your domain design. For instance, let's say you have a Customers table with the following columns to hold a customer's primary address information:
StreetAddress
City
State
Zip
Now, let's say you want to add columns for the customer's mailing address as well so you add in the following columns to the Customers table:
MailingStreetAddress
MailingCity
MailingState
MailingZip
Using LINQ to SQL, the Customer object in your domain would now have properties for each of these eight columns. But if you were following a domain driven design pattern, you would probably have created an Address class and had your Customer class hold two Address properties, one for the mailing address and one for their current address.
That's a simple example, but it demonstrates how the table-per-class pattern can lead to a somewhat smelly domain. In the end, it's up to you. Again, for simple apps that just need basic CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functionality, LINQ to SQL is ideal because of simplicity. But personally I like using NHibernate because it facilitates a cleaner domain.
Edit: #lomaxx - Yes, the example I used was simplistic and could have been optimized to work well with LINQ to SQL. I wanted to keep it as basic as possible to drive home the point. The point remains though that there are several scenarios where having your database structure determine your domain structure would be a bad idea, or at least lead to suboptimal OO design.
Two points that have been missed so far:
LINQ to SQL does not work with Oracle
or any database apart from SqlServer. However 3rd parties do offer better support for Oracle, e.g. devArt's dotConnect, DbLinq, Mindscape's LightSpeed and ALinq. (I do not have any personal experience with these)
Linq to NHibernate lets you used
Linq with a Nhiberate, so it may
remove a reason not to use.
Also the new fluent interface to Nhibernate seems to make it less painful to configure Nhibernate’s mapping. (Removing one of the pain points of Nhibernate)
Update
Linq to Nhiberate is better in Nhiberate v3 that is now in alpha. Looks like Nhiberate v3 may ship towards the end of this year.
The Entity Frame Work as of .net 4 is also starting to look like a real option.
#Kevin: I think the problem with the example you are presenting is that you are using a poor database design. I would have thought you'd create a customer table and an address table and normalized the tables. If you do that you can definately use Linq To SQL for the scenario you're suggesting. Scott Guthrie has a great series of posts on using Linq To SQL which I would strongly suggest you check out.
I don't think you could say Linq and NHibernate complement each other as that would imply that they could be used together, and whilst this is possible, you're much better off choosing one and sticking to it.
NHibernate allows you to map your database tables to your domain objects in a highly flexible way. It also allows you to use HBL to query the database.
Linq to SQL also allows you to map your domain objects to the database however it use the Linq query syntax to query the database
The main difference here is that the Linq query syntax is checked at compile time by the compiler to ensure your queries are valid.
Some things to be aware of with linq is that it's only available in .net 3.x and is only supported in VS2008. NHibernate is available in 2.0 and 3.x as well as VS2005.
Some things to be aware of with NHibernate is that it does not generate your domain objects, nor does it generate the mapping files. You need to do this manually. Linq can
do this automatically for you.
Fluent NHibernate can generate your mapping files based on simple conventions. No XML-writing and strongly typed.
I've recently worked on a project, where we needed to change from Linq To SQL to NHibernate for performance reasons. Especially L2S's way of materializing the objects seems slower than NHibernate's ditto and the change management is quite slow too. And it can be hard to turn the change management off for specific scenarios where it is not needed.
If you are going to use your entities disconnected from the DataContext - in WCF scenarios for example - you're may have a lot of trouble connecting them to the DataContext again for updating the changes. I have had no problems with that with NHibernate.
The thing I will miss from L2S is mostly the code generation that keeps relations up-to-date on both ends of the entities. But I guess there are some tools for NHibernate to do that out there too...
Can you clarify what you mean by "LINQ"?
LINQ isn't an data access technology, it's just a language feature which supports querying as a native construct. It can query any object model which supports specific interfaces (e.g. IQueryable).
Many people refer to LINQ To SQL as LINQ, but that's not at all correct. Microsoft has just released LINQ To Entities with .NET 3.5 SP1. Additionally, NHibernate has a LINQ interface, so you could use LINQ and NHibernate to get at your data.
By LINQ, I'm assuming you mean LINQ to SQL because LINQ, by itself, has no database "goings on" associated with it. It's just an query language that has a boat-load of syntac sugar to make it look SQL-ish.
In the very basic of basic examples, NHibernate and LINQ to SQL seem to both be solving the same problem. Once you get pass that you soon realize that NHibernate has support for a lot of features that allow you to create truly rich domain models. There is also a LINQ to NHibernate project that allows you to use LINQ to query NHibernate in much the same way as you would use LINQ to SQL.
First let´s separate two different things:
Database modeling is concerned about the data while object modeling is concerned about entities and relationships.
Linq-to-SQL advantage is to quickly generate classes out of database schema so that they can be used as active record objects (see active record design pattern definition).
NHibernate advantage is to allow flexibility between your object modeling and database modeling. Database can be modeled to best reflect your data taking in consideration performance for instance. While your object modeling will best reflect the elements of the business rule using an approach such as Domain-Driven-Design. (see Kevin Pang comment)
With legacy databases with poor modeling and/or naming conventions then Linq-to-SQL will reflect this unwanted structures and names to your classes. However NHibernate can hide this mess with data mappers.
In greenfield projects where databases have good naming and low complexity, Linq-to-SQL can be good choice.
However you can use Fluent NHibernate with auto-mappings for this same purpose with mapping as convention. In this case you don´t worry about any data mappers with XML or C# and let NHibernate to generate the database schema from your entities based on a convention that you can customize.
On the other hand learning curve of Linq-to-SQL is smaller then NHibernate.
Or you could use the Castle ActiveRecords project. I've been using that for a short time to ramp up some new code for a legacy project. It uses NHibernate and works on the active record pattern (surprising given its name I know). I haven't tried, but I assume that once you've used it, if you feel the need to drop to NHibernate support directly, it wouldn't be too much to do so for part or all of your project.
As you written "for a person who have not used either of the them"
LINQ to SQL is easy to use so any one can use it easily
It also support procedures, which helps most of the time.
Suppose you want to get data from more than one table then write a procedure and drag that procedure to designer and it will create everything for you,
Suppose your procedure name is "CUSTOMER_ORDER_LINEITEM" which fetch record from all these three table then just write
MyDataContext db = new MyDataContext();
List<CUSTOMER_ORDER_LINEITEMResult> records = db.CUSTOMER_ORDER_LINEITEM(pram1, param2 ...).ToList<CUSTOMER_ORDER_LINEITEMResult>();
you can use you records object in foreach loop as well, which is not supported by NHibernate