Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

Our application makes extensive use of JDBC to access an Oracle database. We wrote it a number of years ago using java 1.1.7 and we have been unable to move to new versions of java because of the performance degradation.

I traced the problem to JDBC calls. I can reproduce the problem using a simple program that simply connects to the database, executes a simple query and then reads the data. The same program running under java 1.4 is about 60% slower than under java 1.1.7. The query is about 80% slower and getting the data is about 150% slower!

The program is attached below. Note, I run the steps twice as the first time the times are much larger which I attribute to java doing some initializations. So the second set of values I think are more representative of the actual performance in our application where there are numerous accesses to the database. Specifically, I focus on step 4 which is the execute query command and step 5 which is the data retrieval step. The table being read has 4 columns with 170 tuples in it.

Here are the timings I get when I run this on a Sparc Ultra 5 running
SunOs 5.8 using an Oracle database running 8.1.7:

                 java 1.1.7  java 1.4
        overall:    2.1s         3.5s
        step 1:     30           200
        step 2:    886          2009
        step 3:      2             2
        step 4:      9            17
        step 5:    122           187
        step 6:      1             1
        step 1:      0             0
        step 2:    203           161
        step 3:      0             1
        step 4:      8            15   <-   87% slower
        step 5:     48           117   <-  143% slower
        step 6:      1             2

I find the same poor performance from java versions 1.2 and 1.3.

I tried using DataDirect's type 4 JDBC driver which gives a little better performance but overall it is still much slower than using java 1.1.7.

Why do the newer versions of java have such poor performance when using JDBC?

What can be done so that we can have performance similar to java 1.1.7
using java 1.4?

========================================================================
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.sql.*;

public class test12 {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        try {
                long time1 = System.currentTimeMillis();
/* step 1 */  DriverManager.registerDriver(
                    new oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver());
                long time2 = System.currentTimeMillis();
/* step 2 */  Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection (
              "jdbc:oracle:thin:@dbserver1:1521:db1","user1","passwd1");
                long time3 = System.currentTimeMillis();
/* step 3 */  Statement stmt = conn.createStatement();
                long time4 = System.currentTimeMillis();
/* step 4 */  ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("select * from table1");
                long time5 = System.currentTimeMillis();
/* step 5 */  while( rs.next() ) {
                  int message_num = rs.getInt(1);
                  String message = rs.getString(2);
              };
                long time6 = System.currentTimeMillis();
/* step 6 */  rs.close(); stmt.close();
                long time7 = System.currentTimeMillis();
            System.out.println("step 1: " + (time2 - time1) );
            System.out.println("step 2: " + (time3 - time2) );
            System.out.println("step 3: " + (time4 - time3) );
            System.out.println("step 4: " + (time5 - time4) );
            System.out.println("step 5: " + (time6 - time5) );
            System.out.println("step 6: " + (time7 - time6) );
            System.out.flush();
        } catch ( Exception e ) {
            System.out.println( "got exception: " + e.getMessage() );
        }
        ... repeat the same 6 steps again...
    }
}