Question

I am reworking a .NET application that so far has been running slowly. Our databases are Oracle, and the code is written in VB. When writing queries, I typically pass the parameters to a middle tier function which builds the raw SQL. I have a database class that has a function ExecuteQuery which takes in a SQL string and returns a DataTable. This uses an OleDbDataAdapter to run the query on the database.

I found some existing code that sends the SQL and a parameter to a stored procedure which as far as I can tell, opens the query and ouputs it to a SYS_REFCURSOR / DataSet.

I don’t know why it’s set up this way, but could someone tell me which is better performance-wise? Or the pros/cons to doing it this way?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Stored Procedures vs dynamic SQL have the exact same performance. In other words there is no performance advantage of one over the other. (Incidentally, I am a HUGE believer in using stored procs for everything for a host of other reasons but that’s not the topic on hand).

Bottle necks can occur for many reasons.

For one, if you are actually code generating select statements it is highly probable that those statements are very unoptimized for the data the app needs. For example, doing a SELECT * which pulls 50 columns back versus a SELECT ID, Description which just pulls the two you need in your application at that point. In this example, the amount of data that has to be read from disk, transferred over the network wire, and pushed into objects in memory of the web server isn’t trivial.

These will have to be evaluated on a case by case basis.

I would highly suggest that if you have a “slow” application that you need to improve the performance of the very first thing you ought to do is profile the application. What part of it is running slow? It might be inside the database server, it might be in your middle tier, it may even be a function of your network bandwidth or memory / load limitations on your web server. Heck, there might even be a WAIT command lurking somewhere in there placed by some previous programmer that left the company…

In short, you have at this point absolutely no idea on where to begin. So looking at actual code is premature. Go profile the app and see where things are slowing down. You might find that performance may radically improve simply by putting more memory in the database server…. Which is a much cheaper alternative than rewriting, testing and deploying vast amounts of code.