Oracle: OCI vs. Thin driver, Statement vs. PreparedStatement

February 09, 2010 03:56:11 Last update: February 09, 2010 04:31:07

The JDBC Thin client is a pure Java, Type IV driver. It is lightweight and easy to install. It provides high performance, comparable to the performance provided by the JDBC Oracle Call Interface (OCI) driver. The JDBC Thin driver is written entirely in Java, and therefore, it is platform-independent. Also, this driver does not require any additional Oracle software on the client-side.

The important thing to notice about the graph is that it's not until about 65 inserts that the PreparedStatement object outperforms the Statement object. 65 inserts! Clearly, the Statement object is more efficient under typical use when using the OCI driver.
you'll see that the Thin driver follows the same behavior as the OCI driver. However, since the Statement object starts out performing better than the PreparedStatement object, it takes about 125 inserts for the PreparedStatement to outperform Statement.
When you consider typical SQL statement usage, even with the Thin driver, you'll get better performance if you execute your SQL statements using a Statement object instead of a PreparedStatement object. Given that, you may ask: why use a PreparedStatement at all? It turns out that there are some reasons why you might use a PreparedStatement object to execute SQL statements. First, there are several types of operations that you simply can't perform without a PreparedStatement object. For example, you must use a PreparedStatement object if you want to use large objects like BLOBs or CLOBs or if you wish to use object SQL. Essentially, you trade some loss of performance for the added functionality of using these object technologies. A second reason to use a PreparedStatement is its support for batching.

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