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ORM Profiler Analyzes Data Access Performance

by Jenni Konrad on Oct 14, 2011 |

Solutions Design has released ORM Profiler, a tool meant to help improve data access layer performance. It tracks and logs ADO.NET calls so that developers can analyze their data access and discover potential problems.

ORM Profiler works with any data access layer built with the DbProviderFactory class using object-relational mapping (ORM), and any database that can be used via that data access layer, including SQL Server, MS Access, Oracle, MySql, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and DB2. It supports .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.0.

According to Solutions Design, only one line of code is required to activate ORM Profiler within an application, and it can be activated from their UI or from the command line. Rather than being a real-time profiler, it takes snapshots for later use. Database calls are logged and presented in three different views:

in the context of the executing code, which allows the user to navigate to the relevant line in Visual Studio (or another code editor);
in chronological order, grouped by transaction; and
grouped by query.

Each of these views is kept in sync when an item is selected, so that the query can be analyzed in all three different ways. ORM Profiler also offers the ability to get the query execution plan from the database, and display it along with the query statistics.

Other features of ORM Profiler include:

support for multiple forms of data access at the same time, as long as they all use DbProviderFactory
the ability to profile multiple applications at once
a robust filtering system
profiling that can be switched on and off with one line of code
configurable alerts

More details on ORM Profiler can be found on its website.