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C# ODBC DB CPU

Hi All,

We have a web application using WCF services hosted by a self-hosting Windows Service. For the moment we are using ODBC as our database connectivity and we have a question regarding CPU at the database level.

We are currently working on a large operation (importing hundreds of thousands of records) and we notice during this operation that the database (Oracle, SQL Server) begins using a large amount of CPU and Memory as well. We are less concerned about the memory growth but it is the CPU that we wonder if we are doing something incorrect to cause such a thrashing of the database. Let me explain the workflow:

- (Web Application) User selects data to import and passes this selection to our self-hosted WCF service. To increase download speeds we are sending data concurrently using a OneWay operation contract (chunks of 200 items).

- (Self-Hosted WCF service) Accepts the selected data from the Web Application, opens a database connection via ODBC, and begins processing the data for import.

During the import of the data we are keeping our transactions very small (only opening transactions at time of save and committing immediately).

Now, we are doing a lot of selects and there are a lot of SELECTS/UPDATES/INSERTS going on but how can we prevent such a thrashing of the database CPU?

I'm sure there are questions, please feel free to ask whatever you need to help us diagnose what the issue could be.

kaufmed

I'm sure you knew this would come up, but I've got to ask: Why use ODBC if there are better performing technologies available (e.g. ODAC, ADO.NET)?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Guy Hengel [angelIII / a3]

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hmstechsupport

ASKER

Ok to be fair we are using ADO.NET (SqlConnection, OracleConnection, etc...) with commands (SqlCommand, OracleCommand, etc...).

We are using parameterized insert and update statements but I would imagine these are freed with the command (we are wrapping the command with a using):

using (IDbCommand dbCommand = GetCommand(ProviderType))
{
PrepareCommand(dbCommand, Connection, Transaction, commandType, commandText, Parameters);

int returnValue = dbCommand.ExecuteNonQuery();
                    
return returnValue;
}

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I'm not sure what this means in terms of parameter binding but it seems we will have to dig in with profiler and see what we find out. Will update as we know more.

Guy Hengel [angelIII / a3]

your code looks just fine in those regards.
so, I would really like to see the "results" of checking with the sql profiler

hmstechsupport

ASKER

It was indeed the application doing too many SQL operations. We cached a bunch of data to reduce this and have completed this with acceptable performance.

hmstechsupport

ASKER

Just to extend on the last comment. We were definitely making way to many SELECT statements on the database and this was causing some major thrashing at the database level and severely reduced the performance of the operation. As mentioned, we are now selecting all the needed data at the beginning of the operation and using that cache rather than constantly going into the database.