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Press Release 09/28/2006

db4o 55x Faster than Hibernate in OO7 Benchmark

Native Object Persistence Solution Eliminates Object-relational Mismatch
with Higher Performance in 19 of 20 Test Cases

SAN MATEO, Calif., Sep. 28, 2006 - db4objects, creator of the leading open source object database for Java and .NET, today announced that another independent benchmark has confirmed db4o's far superior performance for object persistence compared to object-relational mappers like Hibernate.

The ESPRESSO research group at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, has ported the legacy OO7 benchmark from C++ to Java. The OO7 benchmark is the single most recognizable object-oriented performance benchmark available and was introduced by a team led by M.J. Carey in 1993 to measure the performance of complex object persistence operations. The researchers benchmarked db4o, the world's most popular object database, against Hibernate, the leading object-relational mapper from Jboss/RedHat. Both technologies are open source and available in Java and .NET.

The benchmark demonstrates a performance differential of up to 55x when querying for complex objects. Out of the predefined test runs, db4o offered significantly better performance than Hibernate/PostgreSQL in 19 of 20 test cases. The new benchmark confirmed the findings of the 2005 open source benchmark Pole Position on Sourceforge which measures db4o performance up to 44x faster than Hibernate.

The performance difference between db4o and Hibernate results from Hibernate's object-relational mismatch, the inherent incompatibility between object-oriented languages like Java and .NET and relational databases such as Oracle and PostgreSQL. Adding an object-relational mapper like Toplink or Hibernate is only a band aid to ease working with the mismatch and seriously degrades performance compared to a native solution like db4o. With "objects all the way down", db4o is not only much easier to use, but also much faster to run. Performance is among the prime concerns of most developers, especially on resource-constrained devices such as mobile phones, robots or cars.

"It was found that db4o's overall performance was better than that of Hibernate," the researchers concluded. "Many of the test results seem to confirm our rules of thumb (here, that the overhead of object-relational translation causes ORM-based implementations to be consistently slower than staying in object form with an object database)." Specifically, "the general picture is that db4o queries are fast and that Hibernate is competitive only in isolated cases, where perhaps the performance of the relational database part more than compensates for the object-relational overhead."

The full research results are documented in a paper, which is available on www.odbms.org, the research portal for education and research on object databases.

About db4objects, Inc
db4objects, Inc (www.db4o.com) provides db4o, the only native object database for both Java and .NET, available under open source and commercial licenses. 15,000 registered community members and more than 600,000 downloads make db4o the world's most popular object database. db4o is used by some of the world's most innovative companies, including Boeing, BMW, Bosch, Seagate, and Intel. db4objects is a privately held company based in San Mateo, California, and backed by noted Silicon Valley luminaries including Mark Leslie, founding CEO of Veritas, Jerry Fiddler, founding CEO of Wind River, and Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of SUN Microsystems.

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