A case study evaluation of maintainability and performance of persistency techniques

Efforts for software evolution supersede any other part of the software life cycle. Technological decisions have a major impact on the maintainability, but are not well reflected by existing code or architecture based metrics. The way the persistency of object structures with relational databases is solved affects the maintainability of the overall system. Besides maintainability other quality attributes of the software are of interest, in particular performance metrics. However, a systematic evaluation of the benefits and drawback of different persistency frameworks is lacking. In this paper we systematically evaluate the maintainability and performance of different technological approaches for this mapping. The paper presents a testbed and an evaluation process with specifically designed metrics to evaluate persistency techniques regarding their maintainability and performance. In the second part we present and discuss the results of the case study.