JCON EUROPE 2023

MicroStream is a new in-memory data engine for Java applications. It directly stores the Java object graph in an optimized way, removing the burden of having to map data from the Java object model to the relational data model and vice versa, a problem well known as the impedance mismatch. MicroStream claims that their product outperforms JPA-based systems realized with Hibernate. They furthermore argue that it is well-suited for implementing microservices in a cloud-native way where each service complies with the decentralized data management principle of microservices.
Our work empirically assessed the performance of MicroStream by implementing two applications. The first one is a modified version of MicroStream’s BookStore performance demo application. The second application is an OLTP system based
on the TPC-C benchmark specification.
MicroStream does not provide any sophisticated features for concurrent data access management so far, another aspect we investigated in our work by implementing a low level solution with Java 1.0 concurrency concepts.
Our results show that MicroStream is indeed up to 1250 times faster when comparing the service execution time on the server with with the corresponding JPA transaction.
Furthermore, we implemented concurrent data access by using an approach based on structured modelling to handle lock granularity and deadlocks.