Pramatr Blog

Over the past few years there have been numerous posts on Spring Forum regarding the performance of JdbcTemplate. The majority of these are complaining about poor performance of JdbcTemplate in comparison to pure Jdbc. I thought this topic had been done to death already, but a friend of mine told me his developers were having performance problems with JdbcTemplate as recently as last week. They had switched back to Jdbc after some performance comparisons had proven JdbcTemplate was significantly slower.

So what makes JdbcTemplate so much slower than pure Jdbc? In a word…….. nothing. JdbcTemplate does a great job of removing the try/catch/finally/try/catch code we used to write with Jdbc, but under the covers it’s just doing the same old stuff we used to do. It’s getting hold of a connection, executing a statement, possibly mapping a result set to an object, converting any exceptions for us and releasing the connection. That’s pretty much it, it’s a thin wrapper around Jdbc that makes it usable in the real world.

So why do people report performance problems with JdbcTemplate? I took the opportunity to review the comparison that had reported such terrible performance compared to Jdbc. After a couple of minutes reviewing the comparison it was quite obvious it was fatally flawed, not only was it configured differently, it wasn’t testing the same thing. Looking at the comparisons that have been posted in the past on Spring Forum, they typically suffer from the same problems. The most common is they generally don’t perform a fair test. Lets look at the typical problems the comparisons face before seeing the comparison results once the problems were fixed.
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