Understanding the Performance-Energy Tradeoffs of Object-Relational Mapping Frameworks

Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks are the cornerstone of online services. To reply to incoming requests, these services often rely on these frameworks as a convenient data access layer. However, such frameworks might also be the source of performance inefficiency when configured and used inappropriately. This paper, therefore, compares different configurations of state-of-the-art Java-based ORM frameworks to unveil their performance efficiency, traditionally evaluated through metrics such as execution time and memory usage. However, rising environmental concerns have brought energy consumption to the forefront of the conversation. Beyond performance-centric measurements, we shed light on the energy consumption of these building blocks and explore the trade-offs that conceal the expected quality of service and environmental concerns. Our empirical results, obtained with an ORM-based version of the reference Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark C (TPC-C) benchmark, highlight that the adoption of an ORM should be carefully configured by developers to leverage the resources offered by underlying databases.