This document summarizes a presentation about babysitting your ORM with a custom TFS build. The presentation discusses integrating ORM performance analysis into your ALM process using TFS and a profiling tool. It reviews ORMs and CI/TFS, demonstrates why measuring an ORM's behavior is important using examples, and shows a demo of writing tests, committing code through a gated check-in, and viewing profiling results on individual tests to detect issues like N+1 queries. The goal is to apply simple ideas and best practices to gain real, measurable ROI from monitoring ORM performance in your builds and tests.

1. Babysitting Your ORM With A Custom TFS Build

2. Introduction
• My name: Adam Essenmacher
• Who are you?
– Developers?
– Technical Managers?
– Project Managers?
– Evangelists?
– BA’s?

3. Introduction
• ORM Experience
– Used in the past?
– Using currently?
– Which ORMs?

4. Introduction
• Are there any common issues or problems stemming
from your ORM implementations?

5. Anti-Objectives
• This presentation is not:
– … an endorsement of any specific ORM, or even ORMs in
general.
– … an endorsement of any specific tools, languages, or
frameworks.
– … a formula for a ‘silver bullet’.

6. Objectives
• “This presentation will discuss the importance of
integrating ORM performance analysis into your ALM
process and demonstrate a powerful method for doing
so by leveraging your existing CI/TFS environment.”
• This presentation is:
– … framed in the context of the .NET technology stack.
– … an application of simple ideas and established best-practices.
– … a suggestion that carries real, measurable ROI potential.

7. Overview
• Review
– ORMs
– CI/TFS
• Why measure an ORM’s behavior?
• Demo!

8. A Review: Object-Relational Mapper (ORM)
Database
ORM
Application
Code

9. A Review: Object-Relational Mapper (ORM)

10. A Review: Continuous Integration (CI)

11. Why Bother?
ORMs are a leaky abstraction!

12. Why Bother?: Some Numbers
4.8 Years
7.8 Months
• Send packet around the
world?
• Read 1 MB from HD?
11.6 Days
• Read 1 MB from SSD?
5.8 Days
• Make roundtrip in data
center?
1.6 Minutes
.5 Seconds
• Main Memory Ref
• L1 Cache Ref
https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375

13. Why Bother?: An N+1 Example

14. Why Bother?: An N+1 Example

15. Why Bother?: Other Detectable Issues
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•
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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N+1
Too many joins
Variable SQL parameter sizes
Querying from a view
Ends with queries (like ‘%...’)
Excessive return rows
Excessive individual writes
Mixing queries and data binding
Excessive database calls
Unbounded result set
And more:
http://www.hibernatingrhinos.com/products/eprof/learn

16. Why Bother?

17. Why Bother?

18. Prerequisites
• Testing framework (MSTest)
• Continuous integration environment (TFS)
• Profiling software (Entity Framework Profiler)
– http://hibernatingrhinos.com
• Database integration test suite
• Demo project:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ASPNET-MVC-Application-b01a9fe8

19. Demo

20. Demo
• Write exhaustive test suite:

21. Demo
• Commit! (gated check-in):

22. Demo
• Add test initializer:

23. Demo
• Add test tear-down:

24. Demo
• Attempt commit (gated check-in)

25. Demo
• Individual test results:

26. Questions?
• @a_Essenmacher
• aessenmacher@cardinalsolutions.com