Room vs greenDAO for Android : A comparative analysis of performance of Room and greenDAO

Abstract: Android developers often store relational data using databases. There are a couple of database frameworks from which an Android developer can choose. Application performance is often considered when developers choose libraries and frameworks for their applications. Unfortunately, there are limited studies that compare the performance of Android database frameworks. To address this problem, this study presents the results of a comparative analysis of the performance of two of the most popular SQLite-based frameworks, Room Persistence Library (Room) and greenDAO. Performance metrics were execution time for database create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations, amount of RAM and CPU used by the device when performing the CRUD operations and the effect of the application size when using Room or greendAO. In order to find answers these, one application was designed and constructed in three versions. One version used greenDAO, the other used Room while a third which served as the base for comparison, used SQLite for data storage. The results suggests that, greenDAO performs better in all the database CRUD operations. Another finding is that the resulting application size was the same for both Room and greenDAO but were about 5% more than that for SQLite. Room performed particularly worse for database delete and update. This however could be explained by the fact that Room enforces database cascading which greenDAO does not. The results also suggests that application size does increases the memory usage. Future work should be done to compare relational models with database frameworks.