Question

I’m currently trying out db4o (the java version) and I pretty much like what I see. But I cannot help wondering how it does perform in a real live (web-)environment. Does anyone have any experiences (good or bad) to share about running db4o?

Answer 1

We run DB40 .NET version in a large client/server project.

Our experiences is that you can potentially get much better performance than typical relational databases.

However, you really have to tweak your objects to get this kind of performance. For example, if you’ve got a list containing a lot of objects, DB4O activation of these lists is slow. There are a number of ways to get around this problem, for example, by inverting the relationship.

Another pain is activation. When you retrieve or delete an object from DB4O, by default it will activate the whole object tree. For example, loading a Foo will load Foo.Bar.Baz.Bat, etc until there’s nothing left to load. While this is nice from a programming standpoint, performance will slow down the more nesting in your objects. To improve performance, you can tell DB4O how many levels deep to activate. This is time-consuming to do if you’ve got a lot of objects.

Another area of pain was text searching. DB4O’s text searching is far, far slower than SQL full text indexing. (They’ll tell you this outright on their site.) The good news is, it’s easy to setup a text searching engine on top of DB4O. On our project, we’ve hooked up Lucene.NET to index the text fields we want.

Some APIs don’t seem to work, such as the GetField APIs useful in applying database upgrades. (For example, you’ve renamed a property and you want to upgrade your existing objects in the database, you need to use these ‘reflection’ APIs to find objects in the database. Other APIs, such as the [Index] attribute don’t work in the stable 6.4 version, and you must instead specify indexes using the Configure().Index(‘someField’), which is not strongly typed.

We’ve witnessed performance degrade the larger your database. We have a 1GB database right now and things are still fast, but not nearly as fast as when we started with a tiny database.

We’ve found another issue where Db4O.GetByID will close the database if the ID doesn’t exist anymore in the database.

We’ve found the Native Query syntax (the most natural, language-integrated syntax for queries) is far, far slower than the less-friendly SODA queries. So instead of typing:

// C# syntax for 'Find all MyFoos with Bar == 23'. // (Note the Java syntax is more verbose using the Predicate class.) IList<MyFoo> results = db4o.Query<MyFoo>(input => input.Bar == 23); 

Instead of that nice query code, you have to an ugly SODA query which is string-based and not strongly-typed.

For .NET folks, they’ve recently introduced a LINQ-to-DB4O provider, which provides for the best syntax yet. However, it’s yet to be seen whether performance will be up-to-par with the ugly SODA queries.

DB4O support has been decent: we’ve talked to them on the phone a number of times and have received helpful info. Their user forums are next to worthless, however, almost all questions go unanswered. Their JIRA bug tracker receives a lot of attention, so if you’ve got a nagging bug, file it on JIRA on it often will get fixed. (We’ve had 2 bugs that have been fixed, and another one that got patched in a half-assed way.)

If all this hasn’t scared you off, let me say that we’re very happy with DB4O, despite the problems we’ve encountered. The performance we’ve got has blown away some O/RM frameworks we tried. I recommend it.

update July 2015 Keep in mind, this answer was written back in 2008. While I appreciate the upvotes, the world has changed since then, and this information may not be as reliable as it was when it was written.