Performance Analysis of Relational Databases, Object-Oriented Databases and ORM Frameworks

Abstract: In the planning stage of web and software development, it is important to select the right tool for the job. When selecting the database to use, relational databases like MySQL is a popular choice. However, relational databases suffer by object-relational impedance mismatch. In this work we will explore the response time of relational and object-oriented databases and the overhead of ORM frameworks. This will be done by creating a web application that receives data about flights and airports from a client, which measures the response time of the databases and the entire request. It was found that MySQL has the lowest response time, while the ORM framework Hibernate adds an overhead on some of the tests while performing similar to MySQL. Db4o had the highest response time in a majority of the tests. In future works, this study could be extended by other tests or by other type of databases.