In the first post on NHibernate Optimization, mapping file configuration was discussed. This post will focus on code optimization in data access objects (DAOs).

Load objects by ID.
Object should be loaded by ID whenever possible to benefit from first-level cache (session cache). Whenever an object is saved or loaded it is added to NHibernate's first-level cache with the ID as the key. As a reminder when NHibernate loads an object, it first looks in the first-level cache, then query cache, followed by second-level cache and finally SQL is executed. Therefore, loading an object by ID will be very quick if it is already in first-level cache.

Sometimes the UI layer needs to request an object with a business key rather than a surrogate key. In this case, a thread-safe Dictionary with key=business key and value=surrogate key should be considered. The UI layer requests the object by business key from the service layer. The service layer finds the surrogate key in the Dictionary and uses it to query the DAO. This is a little extra work, but  can reap appreciable performance benefits.

Use HQL, DTOs, and/or hand-coded ADO.NET in bottlenecks.
Oftentimes the UI layer presents a screen that summarizes the state of many different objects, which can force many separate and expensive database calls that return much more data that is actually necessary. A good way to optimize this is to use HQL or hand-coded ADO.NET to SELECT only the required data, using aggregate functions if necessary, and return the data in a non-hibernate mapped data transfer object (DTO).

This post scratched the surface of code optimizations in the data access layer. Please stand by for upcoming code optimization recommendations.

Labels: .Net, NHibernate