ORMBattle.NET

We just updated the scorecard - now there is BLToolkit, that immediately became leader on performance tests. I'm eagerly waiting for adaptation of our LINQ tests for it. BLToolkit team develops LINQ provider for more than one year, so its results must be pretty good.

Code.ORMBattle.net and downloads section were also updated with the latest repository snapshot.

Everything else related to this update is described here. Enjoy new results ;)

I think this kind of competition is not only an amusing show for our users. First of all it is absolutely essential for the participants. It is a unique chance to take a look in a new fashion at what we do and how, to identify the best and the 'can be better' sides of our products, and to receive and share ideas. Therefore, this competition can definitely help us to improve our products. If the products are enhanced, then the customers win. The customers win, the vendors win. I am confident that in this competition everyone can be a winner.

Igor Tkachev,
Business Logic Toolkit Development Team

Hello everyone :)

Dimitar Kapitanov, Product manager for Telerik OpenAccess ORM product, has expressed his opinion about ORMBattle.NET.

That's actually a very good news for us. We are communicating with Dimitar for about a week now, and I can say his initial opinion about ORMBattle.NET was nearly the same. We got no complains at all, but a set of good ideas related to the future development of this test suite.

Frankly speaking, I was even a bit surprised by his reaction. I was pretty disappointed that time after getting completely different feedback from... You must know who I'm talking about ;) Luckily, the same time I discovered Telerik is not the only ORM vendor, which view on launch of this web site is generally positive. And I see no any reasons to avoid being scored here except... Except the either the fear to look worse than you really are - this was never a showstopper for any fighter that is fully self-confident ;), or a fear of being honestly compared to stronger players.

So I'd like to ask other vendors to think about officially joining this comparison. As it was just shown, even a relatively simple tool can be #1 here. Performance and LINQ quality are quite important factors (as I wrote, I think they're related to code quality - at least, a good score here must be a good proof of this), but they are definitely not even the main ones. Framework architecture (which frequently affects on performance), documentation and support quality, user base - everything must be taken into account.

Think about C# vs C++. If you have a very complex framework providing tons of built-in features, I think it's ok to get noticeably lower performance score here in comparison to simpler ones - e.g. 2-3 times difference must be fully acceptable here, at least in some particular cases.On the other hand, you might expect nearly the same numbers from similar frameworks (like C# and Java in computer languages). And a significant difference must look suspicious in this case.

I hope our effort will allow developers to choose the right tool for their needs. Following the same analogy, such a comparison allows developers to choose between C++, .NET or Python implementations, explicitly exposing the fastest ones among them. Currently there is nothing like this in ORM world, and I hope this web site will partially illuminate the darkness around this.

From what I’ve seen so far, I expect the first question of the audience would be why a prominent developer tools vendor like Telerik supports such an initiative? Well we find it a nice start of a community effort to put some real numbers behind the claims of all participants in this growing domain. It was about time. There is not a single resource that gives a glance over the products, the vendors behind them, and their real virtues. The ORM domain is now a ‘first class’ citizen in the .NET space and we all owe that to the Entity Framework, and even more so to Linq To Sql. So from my perspective the domain is getting mature (in the .NET space) , the number of the products that provide O/R mapping is increasing, more and more features are brought to life… So why not measure all key aspects of those products (If I was to develop such a product, I would definitely go for LINQ and performance first, you know)? I think definitely this is the next step. And not because of a marketing reasons, but just because if there are no real figures behind the different tests, it looks like if we are a bunch of clairvoyants claiming we see the future… you know what I ‘am talking about. All in all, I believe all interested should participate and show openly their results. We are keen to have our product benchmarked against the others. And with the help of all you guys, we can make the testing framework better, more transparent, and more fair so that we are comparing apples to apples. We value what the guys from ORMBattle.net did so far, and we hope that we at least will use this comparison toolkit to the benefit of our customers - to improve the product and provide more ‘green’ slots in the comparison matrix :)

P.S. I hope this post will not spur political comments. Let’s focus on constructive actions and get to work with the comparison.

Dimitar Kapitanov,
Product manager for Telerik OpenAccess ORM product line.