DBridge: Translating Imperative Code to SQL

Abstract

Application programs that access data located remotely (such as in a database) often perform poorly due to multiple network round trips and transfer of unused data. This situation is exacerbated in applications that use object-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks such as Hibernate, as developers tend to express complex query logic using imperative code, resulting in poor performance. DBridge is a system for optimizing data access in database applications by using static program analysis and program transformations. Recently, we incorporated a new suite of optimization techniques into DBridge. These techniques optimize database application programs by identifying relational operations expressed in imperative code, and translating them into SQL. In this demonstration, we showcase these techniques using a plugin for the IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE as the front end. We show the performance gains achieved by employing our system on real world applications that use JDBC or Hibernate.