nHibernate Recompiles and Execution Plans

April 29, 2008 at 6:28 pm (nHibernate) (execution plan, nhibernate maintenance, nhibernate performance, nhibernate tsql, plan cache, TSQL)

One little potential for performance problems that we’ve seen comes out of how nHibernate generates it’s parameratized queries. It limits the length of any parameter to the length of the column, but if the length of that parameter is less than the column, it uses tha smaller length when declaring the variable. This results in a query that looks like this:

exec sp_executesql N'INSERT INTO dbo.users (Name, Password, EmailAddress, LastLogon, LogonId) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4)',N'@p0 nvarchar(8),@p1 nvarchar(6),@p2 nvarchar(12),@p3 datetime,@p4 nvarchar(8)',@p0=N'Ted Cool',@p1=N'abc123',@p2=N'ted@cool.com',@p3='2008-04-29 14:10:44:000',@p4=N'ted_cool'

Note the parameter @p4 which is the parameter mapping to the primary key for the little sample table. In this query it’s declared as nvarchar( 8 ) because ‘ted_cool’ is composed of eight characters. But if we changed it to ‘ted_coolish’:

exec sp_executesql N'INSERT INTO dbo.users (Name, Password, EmailAddress, LastLogon, LogonId) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4)',N'@p0 nvarchar(8),@p1 nvarchar(6),@p2 nvarchar(12),@p3 datetime,@p4 nvarchar(11)',@p0=N'Ted Cool',@p1=N'abc123',@p2=N'ted@cool.com',@p3='2008-04-29 14:13:30:000',@p4=N'ted_coolish'

Now that same parameter is declared as nvarchar(11). So if we look at the procedure cache to see what’s inside for this query:
 
SELECTobjtype
,p.
size_in_bytes
,[sql].
[text]
FROM
sys.dm_exec_cached_plans
p
OUTER APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(p.plan_handle)
sql
WHERE
[text] LIKE
‘%INSERT INTO dbo.users%’

 We get the following results (I ran the test a few times, so I have more than two rows):

Prepared 40960 (@p0 nvarchar(8),@p1 nvarchar(6),@p2 nvarchar(12),@p3 datetime,@p4 nvarchar(11))INSERT INTO dbo.users (Name, Password, EmailAddress, LastLogon, LogonId) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4)

Prepared 40960 (@p0 nvarchar(8),@p1 nvarchar(6),@p2 nvarchar(12),@p3 datetime,@p4 nvarchar(10))INSERT INTO dbo.users (Name, Password, EmailAddress, LastLogon, LogonId) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4)

Prepared 40960 (@p0 nvarchar(8),@p1 nvarchar(6),@p2 nvarchar(12),@p3 datetime,@p4 nvarchar(12))INSERT INTO dbo.users (Name, Password, EmailAddress, LastLogon, LogonId) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4)

Prepared 40960 (@p0 nvarchar(8),@p1 nvarchar(6),@p2 nvarchar(12),@p3 datetime,@p4 nvarchar(8))INSERT INTO dbo.users (Name, Password, EmailAddress, LastLogon, LogonId) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4)

For what should have been a single plan, I have four (or more) clogging up the cache and causing unecessary compiles, etc. I’m not completely enamored with what this tool is going to do tofor me as a dba.