On the right path.

So I made an Index version of the DBObjects to test this new method. To say the least, it’s been a very inlighting. 

For my test each object had to get 1,248 User records 100 times (so I could get an average). As far as just retraving the inital list, the index method worked considerablly faster. This didn’t come as a surprise because it’s just geting all the IDs for all of the user records in the system.

Normal method Retreave List: 3.8 seconds
Index method Retreave List:    0.43 seconds

As I said this isn’t surprising because the index method only fetches 1 out of 5 columns. Now on to actually accessing a property for every item in the list

Normal method Access: 0.0 secionds (around 6,700 ticks)
Index method Access:    3:50.50 minutes (around 850,000,000 ticks)!

The index method lost horribly! It just takes too long to query the database 1,248 times. So far this is pretty much what I expected. Heres the total averages.

Normal Retreave & Access: 2.13 secionds (21,380,733 ticks)
Index Retreave & Access: 1:53.21 minuetes (around 1,132,100,354 ticks)

So far it looks like I’ve been on the right track. In my experiment I did create something neat. For the index I created the abliblity to get a list of objects from the DBList object, with a call like DBList users = new DBList(typeof(DBUser));

One thing I might want to try, is instead of making 1,248 calls to the database, to get batches at a time. So if I want user.id = 1, it’ll actually load the first 100 or so items. That would reduce our class to 13. But still I just don’t see how 13 calls is going to be any faster than our single call to get all 1,248 items.