Java vs. PL/SQL

Quite a while ago, I compared Java and PL/SQL to gauge their relative performance.

Recently (okay, back in mid-June) I got this request.

One thing I would like to compare is Java vs PL/SQL using native

compilation (search Oracle for NCOMP). Would you be willing to repeat

your benchmark tests using NCOMP? NCOMP is pretty straightforward to

set up, I think it is even easier in 11g, if you are using that.

Also, when you test Java vs. PL/SQL, are you using Java stored

procedures in Oracle, or are you using an external VM and connecting

to Oracle? (One annoying limitation to Java Stored Procedures is the

lack of threading ability, among a few other things).

Native Compilation will not make PL/SQL magically faster than Java. The very best it can do is make PL/SQL as fast as Java. The clunky, inelegance of PL/SQL isn't fixed by NCOMP, either.

My test was PL/SQL stored procedures in Oracle. These were compared against Java programs in a separate JVM. I didn't use Java stored procedures because the client didn't ask for this.

The client had legacy C code they wanted reverse engineered and reimplemented. PL/SQL was unsuitable for this task for a number of reasons.

1. PL/SQL is slower than C or Java. Speed mattered.
2. PL/SQL is a clunky and inelegant language. Worse than C and far worse than Java. The application would have grown to gargantuan proportions.
3. The legacy C code was full of constructs that would have to be rethought from their very essence to recast them in PL/SQL. Java, for the most part, is a better fit with legacy C. The reverse-engineering was -- relatively -- easy in moving from C to Java.

There were some additional, minor considerations.

1. There is some unit testing capability in PL/SQL (UTPLSQL), but it's not as feature-rich as JUnit. Unit testing was essential for proving that the legacy features were ported correctly.
2. PL/SQL is hard to develop. A nice IDE (like NetBeans or Eclipse) makes it very easy to write Java. The customer was using Toad and wasn't planning to introduce the kind of IDE required to build large, complex applications.

In short, the simple speed test -- PL/SQL vs. Java -- was sufficient to show that PL/SQL is simply too slow for compute-intensive speed-critical applications.