7. Optimizing the Data Access Layer | Learning NHibernate 4

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Learning NHibernate 4

By : Suhas H Chatekar

3.6 (9)

Learning NHibernate 4

3.6 (9)

By: Suhas H Chatekar

Overview of this book

This book targets .NET developers who have never used an ORM before, developers who have used an ORM before but are new to NHibernate, or have used NHibernate sparingly and want to learn more about NHibernate.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Introduction to NHibernate

1. Introduction to NHibernate

What is ORM?

What is NHibernate?

What is new in NHibernate 4.0?

NHibernate for users of Entity Framework

Is using ORM a bad idea?

Building blocks of NHibernate

Summary

2. Let's Build a Simple Application

2. Let's Build a Simple Application

Explaining the approach used in learning NHibernate

The problem statement

The development setup

The domain model

Adding some code

Summary

3. Let's Tell NHibernate About Our Database

3. Let's Tell NHibernate About Our Database

Important NHibernate terminology

Mapping the prerequisites

Different mechanisms to write the mappings

XML mappings for the Employee class

Identifier generation

Mapping associations

Mapping inheritance

Mapping components

Mapping by code

Fluent mapping a.k.a. Fluent NHibernate

Choosing the right mapping method

Summary

4. NHibernate Warm-up

4. NHibernate Warm-up

Warming up NHibernate succinctly

The NHibernate session architecture

XML configuration

Programmatic configuration

Loquacious configuration

Fluent configuration

Configuration options

Generating the database scripts from mappings

Summary

5. Let's Store Some Data into the Database

5. Let's Store Some Data into the Database

Entity states

Transactions and unit of work

Saving entities

Transitive persistence using cascade styles

Transitive persistence/cascading in action

Bidirectional associations and ownership

Order of operations

Entity equality

The architecture diagram

Summary

6. Let's Retrieve Some Data from the Database

6. Let's Retrieve Some Data from the Database

Querying the workflow

Different querying methods

Joins

Lazy loading

Eager fetching

Pagination and ordering of results

Retrieving entities by identifiers

Polymorphic queries

Summary

7. Optimizing the Data Access Layer

7. Optimizing the Data Access Layer

Baseline and optimize

Organization of the chapter

Batching

Fetching strategies

Avoiding the select N+1 problem

Avoiding eager fetching

Using extra-lazy for lazy collections

Summary

8. Using NHibernate in a Real-world Application

8. Using NHibernate in a Real-world Application

What kind of application are we building?

Architectural principles we will follow

Feature 1 – onboarding an employee

Unit of work

Feature 2 – updating the details of an employee

Feature 3 – searching employees

Summary

9. Advanced Data Access Patterns

9. Advanced Data Access Patterns

Problems with the repository pattern

Specification pattern

Query object pattern

Summary

10. Working with Legacy Database

10. Working with Legacy Database

Composite IDs

Components

Join-mapping to load data from multiple tables

Working with database views

Using subselect instead of views

Working with stored procedures

Using custom DTOs

Summary

11. A Whirlwind Tour of Other NHibernate Features

11. A Whirlwind Tour of Other NHibernate Features

Concurrency control

Event system

Caching

Stateless sessions

User-defined types

Summary

Index

Index

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Fetching strategies 

Lazy loading is about "when associated entities are loaded". There is another angle to loading associated entities which is about "how associated entities are loaded". The latter is controlled by a feature called fetching strategy. A simple example here would help. Suppose you want to retrieve all benefit records for a particular employee. There are different ways of doing this. For instance, following are two different SQL queries that I can think of to retrieve benefit records:

You can use a join between Employee and Benefit table
You can just select from the Benefit table using a WHERE clause that limits the records by matching foreign key column Employee_Id to the ID of the employee record

NHibernate supports three different ways of fetching associations. Through fetching strategy you can tell NHibernate which way it should use for a particular association. From optimization point of view, this is a good lever to use. Fetching strategy is declared as part of mapping...

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