ORM Benchmarks

This repo contains the app that was used to collect the data for ORM benchmarks.

You can learn more about the benchmark methodology and results in this blog post: Performance Benchmarks: Comparing Query Latency across TypeScript ORMs & Databases.

Setup

1. Set up the repo

Clone the repo, navigate into it and install dependencies:

git clone git@github.com:prisma/orm-benchmarks.git
cd orm-benchmarks
npm install

2. Configure database connection

Set the DATABASE_URL environment variable to your database connection string in a .env file.

First, create a .env file:

touch .env

Then open the .env file and add the following line:

DATABASE_URL="your-database-url"

For example:

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:password@host:port/db"

Alternative: Set the DATABASE_URL in the terminal

Alternatively, you can set the DATABASE_URL in the terminal:

export DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:password@host:port/db"

3. Run database migration

To create the database and the schema, run the prisma db push command by pointing it to the schema of your database.

PostgreSQL

If you use PostgreSQL, run:

npx prisma db push --schema ./prisma-pg/schema.prisma

Note: We may add more databases in the future.

4. Run the benchmarks

Note for PostgreSQL: Since the data preparation/seeding relies on pg_dump and pg_restore, the PostgreSQL versions of the machine that's executing the script must match the version of the target PostgreSQL server.

sh ./benchmark.sh -i 500 -s 1000 

This executes the benchmark scripts with 500 iterations and a sample size of 1000 records per table. See below for the different options you can provide to any benchmark runs.

The results of the benchmark run will be stored in a folder called results/DB-SIZE-ITERATIONS-TIMESTAMP, e.g. results/postgresql-1000-500-1721027353940. This folder will have one .csv file per ORM, e.g.:

results/postgresql-1000-500-1721027353940
├── drizzle.csv
├── prisma.csv
└── typeorm.csv

Usage

Executing the benchmarks

You can execute the benchmarks by running the benchmark.sh:

sh ./benchmark.sh [options]

Options

You can provide the following options to the script:

Name	Short	Default	Description	Required
--iterations	-i	2	Number of times to execute the benchmarks	No
--size	-s	50	Size of the data set (number of records per table)	No
--database-url	-d	n/a	Database connection string	No

For example:

sh ./benchmark.sh -i 500 -s 1000 --database-url postgresql://user:password@host:port/db

Debugging

You can turn on two debug setting via the DEBUG environment variable:

• benchmarks:compare-results: Compare the results at the end of each benchmark run. Note that this approach will consume more memory because the results of all executed queries are collected.

Notes

• This repo contains an unfinished MySQL implementation.
• The final results that are published on benchmarks.prisma.io are based on the data in ./results-website.
• The script in ./src/lib/website-output.ts is used to generate the JSON structures that are the basis for the result visualisation in benchmarks.prisma.io.
• For Postgres, there are two ways how the seeding is implemented:
  • Option 1: Seed data with Prisma Client's createMany query (implemented in ./src/lib/prepare-pg-prisma.ts)
  • Option 2: Seed data with Prisma Client's createMany query only once, then store a DB dump in ./data/... and restore the dump upon subsequent invocations (implemented in ./src/lib/prepare-pg-native.ts)