Ayende @ Rahien

Uber Prof 2.0 is OUT!

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Exactly 4 years after the 1.0 release of Uber Prof, we have the 2.0 release for Uber Prof.

You can find it here: http://hibernatingrhinos.com/products/

New features include production and cloud profiling, performance improvement and better error detection & guidance.

Goodbye, 2012: Our end of year discount starts now!

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 05:02:00 GMT

Well, as the year draws to a close, it is that time again, I got older, apparently. Yesterday marked my 31th trip around the sun.

To celebrate, I decided to give the first 31 people a 31% discount for all of our products.

This offer applies to:

This also applies to our support & consulting services.

All you have to do is to use the following coupon code: goodbye-2012

Enjoy the end of the year, and happy holidays.

Production Cloud Profiling With Uber Prof

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:00:00 GMT

With Uber Prof 2.0 (NHibernate Profiler, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, LLBLGen Profiler) we are going to bring you a new era of goodness.

In 1.0, we gave you a LOT of goodness for the development stage of building your application, but now we are able to take it a few steps further. Uber Prof 2.0 supports production profiling, which means that you can run it in production and see what is going on in your application now!

To make things even more interesting, we have also done a lot of work to make sure that this works on the cloud as well. For example, go ahead and look at this site: http://efprof.cloudapp.net/

This is a live application, that doesn’t really do anything special, I’ll admit. But the kicker is when you go to this URL: http://efprof.cloudapp.net/profiler/profiler.html

This is EF Prof, running on the cloud, and giving you the results that you want, live. You can read all about this feature and how to enable it here, but I am sure that you can see the implications.

Über Profiler v2.0–Private Beta is open

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Well, it took a while, but the next version of the NHibernate Profiler is ready to go to a private beta.

We go to private beta before the product is done, because we want to get as much early feedback as we can.

We have 10 spots for NHibernate Profiler v2.0 and 10 spots for Entity Framework Profiler v2.0.

If you are interested, please send me an email about this.

What is next for the profilers?

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:00:00 GMT

We have been working on the profilers (NHibernate Profiler, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, LLBLGen Profiler and Hibernate Profiler) for close to three years now. And we have been running always as 1.x, so we didn’t have a major release (although we have continual releases, we currently have close to 900 drops of the 1.x version).

The question now becomes, what is going to happen in the next version of the profiler?

Production Profiling, the ability to setup your application so that you can connect to your production application and see what is going on right now.
Error Analysis, the ability to provide you with additional insight and common solution to recurring problems.
Global Query Analysis, the ability to take all of your queries, look at their query plans and show your potential issues.

Those are the big ones, we have a few others, and a surprise in store

What would you want to see in the next version of the profiler?

Uber Prof & NuGet

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Fitzchak has all the details in our company blog.

New Profiler Feature: Avoid Writes from Multiple Sessions In The Same Request

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:26:00 GMT

Because I keep getting asked, this feature is available for the following profilers:

This new feature detects a very interesting bad practice, write to the database from multiple session in the same web request.

For example, consider the following code:

public void SaveAccount(Account account)
{
    using(var session = sessionFactory.OpenSession())
    using(session.BeginTransaction())
    {
           session.SaveOrUpdate(account);
           session.Transaction.Commit();    
    }
}
public Account GetAccount(int id)
{
    using(var session = sessionFactory.OpenSession())
    {
        return session.Get<Account>(id);
    }
}

It is bad for several reasons, micro managing the session is just one of them, but the worst part is yet to come…

public void MakePayment(int fromAccount, int toAccount, decimal ammount)
{
    var from = Dao.GetAccount(fromAccount);
    var to = Dao.GetAccount(toAccount);
    from.Total -= amount;
    to.Total += amount;
    Dao.SaveAccount(from);
    Dao.SaveAccount(to);
}

Do you see the error here? There are actually several, let me count them:

We are using 4 different connections to the database in a single method.
We don’t have transactional safety!!!!

Think about it, if the server crashed between the fifth and sixth lines of this method, where would we be?

We would be in that wonderful land where money disappear into thin air and we stare at that lovely lawsuit folder and then jump from a high window to a stormy sea.

Or, of course, you could use the profiler, which will tell you that you are doing something which should be avoided:

Isn’t that better than swimming with the sharks?

New Uber Prof Feature: Too Many Database Calls In The Same Request

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:15:00 GMT

Recently, we added a way to track alerts across all the sessions the request. This alert will detect whenever you are making too many database calls in the same request.

But wait, don’t we already have that?

Yes, we do, but that was limited to the scope of one session. there is a very large set of codebases where the usage of OR/Ms is… suboptimal (in other words, they could take the most advantage of the profiler abilities to detect issues and suggest solutions to them), but because of the way they are structured, they weren’t previously detected.

What is the difference between a session and a request?

Note: I am using NHibernate terms here, but naturally this feature is shared among all profiler:

NHibernate Profiler

Entity Framework Profiler

Linq to SQL Profiler

LLBLGen Profiler

Hibernate Profiler

A session is the NHibernate session (or the data/object context in linq to sql / entity framework), and the request is the HTTP request or the WCF operation. If you had code such as the following:

public T GetEntity<T>(int id)
{
    using (var session = sessionFactory.OpenSession())
    {
         return session.Get<T>(id);
    }
}

This code is bad, it micro manages the session, it uses too many connections to the database, it … well, you get the point. The problem is that code that uses this code:

public IEnumerable<Friends> GetFriends(int[] friends)
{
   var results = new List<Friends>();
   foreach(var id in friends)
       results.Add(GetEnttiy<Friend>(id));

   return results;
}

The code above would look like the following in the profiler:

As you can see, each call is in a separate session, and previously, we wouldn’t have been able to detect that you have too many calls (because each call is a separate session).

Now, however, we will alert the user with a too many database calls in the same request alerts.

New Uber Prof Concept: Cross Session Alerts

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:05:00 GMT

We have recently been doing some work on Uber Prof, mostly in the sense of a code review, and I wanted to demonstrate how easy it was to add a new feature. The problem is that we couldn’t really think of a nice feature to add that we didn’t already have.

Then we started thinking about features that aren’t there and that there wasn’t anything in Uber Prof to enable, and we reached the conclusion that one limitation we have right now is the inability to analyze your application’s behavior beyond the session’s level. But there is actually a whole set of bad practices that are there when you are using multiple sessions.

That led to the creation of a new concept the Cross Session Alert, unlike the alerts we had so far, those alerts looks at the data stream with a much broader scope, and they can analyze and detect issues that we previously couldn’t detect.

I am going to be posting extensively on some of the new features in just a bit, but in the meantime, why don’t you tell me what sort of features do you think this new concept is enabling.

And just a reminder, my architecture is based around Concepts & Features.

Uber Prof New Features: A better query plan

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Originally posted at 1/7/2011

Because I keep getting asked, this feature is available for the following profilers:

This feature is actually two separate ones. The first is the profiler detecting what is the most expensive part of the query plan and making it instantly visible. As you can see, in this fairly complex query, it is this select statement that is the hot spot.

Another interesting feature that only crops up whenever we are dealing with complex query plans is that the query plan can get big. And by that I mean really big. Too big for a single screen.

Therefore, we added zooming capabilities as well as the mini map that you see in the top right corner.

Uber Prof New Features: Go To Session from alert

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Originally posted at 1/7/2011

This is another oft requested feature that we just implemented. The new feature is available for the full suite of Uber Profilers:

You can see the new feature below:

I think it is cute, and was surprisingly easy to do.

Uber Prof have recently passed the stage where it is mostly implemented using itself, so I just had to wire a few things together, and then I spent most of the time just making sure that things aligned correctly on the UI.

Happy New Year, and across the board profiler discount

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 09:11:56 GMT

To celebrate the new year, I decided to offer a single day coupon that will get you 35% discount for all my profiler products.

The coupon code is valid until the 1st of January 2011, but I won’t mention in which timezone, so you might want to hurry up.

The coupon code is:

HNY-45K2D465DD

You can use it to buy:

Happy new year!

What is Uber Prof’s competitive advantage?

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:00:00 GMT

Originally posted at 11/25/2010

In a recent post, I discussed the notion of competitive advantage and how you should play around them. In this post, I am going to focus on Uber Prof. Just to clarify, when I am talking about Uber Prof, I am talking about NHibernate Profiler, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, Hibernate Profiler and LLBLGen Profiler. Uber Prof is just a handle for me to use to talk about each of those.

So, what is the major competitive advantage that I see in the Uber Prof line of products?

Put very simply, they focus very heavily on the developer’s point of view.

Other profilers will give you the SQL that is being executed, but Uber Prof will show you the SQL and:

Format that SQL in a way that make it easy to read.
Group the SQL statements into sessions. Which let the developer look at what is going on in the natural boundary.
Associate each query with the exact line of code that executed it.
Provide the developer with guidance about improving their code.

There are other stuff, of course, but those are the core features that make Uber Prof into what it is.

Profiler Usage Analysis

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:00:00 GMT

I have been doing some studying of how people are using the profiler, and it shows some interesting results.

Typical profiler session is :

NH Prof : 1:15 hours
Hibernate Profiler: 1:05 hours
EF Prof: 42 minutes
L2S Prof: 50 minutes

83% of the profiler users have used it more than once. In fact, here is the # of usages:

So we have over 50% that use it regularly.
Most people use it predominately to view the statements executed:

This means that the reports are getting comparatively little attention.
The results per geographical location are also interesting:

Hibernate Profiler New Feature: Parameters Values

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:12:00 GMT

One of the annoying things about the Hibernate port of the profiler was that JDBC didn’t provide us with the parameters values.

Eric has just fixed and that is now live:

Enjoy…

Profiler new feature: Too many joins detection

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT

This is Josh’s feature, since we wrote most of the code for it together. Basically, it recognize a very common performance problem, queries that uses too many joins, such as this one:

Which would result in the following warning:

Queries with too many joins might be a performance problem. Each join requires the database to perform additional work, and the complexity and cost of the query grows rapidly with each additional join. While relational database are optimized for handling joins, it is often more efficient to perform several separate queries instead of a single query with several joins in it.

For OLTP systems, you should consider simplifying your queries or simplifying the data model. While I do not recommend avoiding joins completely, I strong discourage queries with large numbers of joins. Another issue to pay attention to is possible Cartesian products in queries contains joins, it is very easy to create such a thing and not notice it during development.

Profiler Subscription?

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:47:00 GMT

One repeated request for the profiler is to have a personal version (which a price to match).

I am not really happy with the idea, for several reasons. One of the major ones is that I have enough variability in the product already, and adding a new edition in addition to the 4 we already support is bound to create headaches. Another is that I simply cannot just draw a line and say “those are the pro features and these are the personal features”.

Instead, I wonder about offering a subscription model, something with a cost around 10 – 15 Euro per month. This would be renewed monthly (automatically), and beyond just having a lower price point, it will also provide automatic upgrades across versions (so free upgrade from 1.x to 2.x).

Thoughts?

Profiler Speculative Feature: Query plans

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:24:00 GMT

This isn’t a new feature, because you can’t use it right now, but it is a really nice feature that we are working on, and I couldn’t resist showing it off hot “off the press”, so to speak.

Given the following query:

SELECT this_.id             AS id7_1_,
       this_.title          AS title7_1_,
       this_.subtitle       AS subtitle7_1_,
       this_.allowscomments AS allowsco4_7_1_,
       this_.createdat      AS createdat7_1_,
       posts2_.blogid       AS blogid3_,
       posts2_.id           AS id3_,
       posts2_.id           AS id0_0_,
       posts2_.title        AS title0_0_,
       posts2_.TEXT         AS text0_0_,
       posts2_.postedat     AS postedat0_0_,
       posts2_.blogid       AS blogid0_0_,
       posts2_.userid       AS userid0_0_
FROM   blogs this_
       LEFT OUTER JOIN posts posts2_
         ON this_.id = posts2_.blogid
WHERE this_.id = 1 /* @p0 */

SELECT this_.id            AS id0_1_,
       this_.title         AS title0_1_,
       this_.TEXT          AS text0_1_,
       this_.postedat      AS postedat0_1_,
       this_.blogid        AS blogid0_1_,
       this_.userid        AS userid0_1_,
       comments2_.postid   AS postid3_,
       comments2_.id       AS id3_,
       comments2_.id       AS id2_0_,
       comments2_.name     AS name2_0_,
       comments2_.email    AS email2_0_,
       comments2_.homepage AS homepage2_0_,
       comments2_.ip       AS ip2_0_,
       comments2_.TEXT     AS text2_0_,
       comments2_.postid   AS postid2_0_
FROM   posts this_
       LEFT OUTER JOIN comments comments2_
         ON this_.id = comments2_.postid
WHERE this_.blogid = 1 /* @p1 */

The profiler can show you the query plan using this UI:

And here is how the same query looks like using the query plan feature in Management Studio:

So, why implement it?

This isn’t limited to SQL Server, the profiler can display query plans for: SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL
This let you keep yourself in the flow, just hit a button to see the query plan, instead of copying the SQL, opening SSMS, displaying the query plan, etc.

Don’t discount the last one, making it easy is one of the core values of the profiler.

The idea is that if you make it easy enough, the barriers for using it goes away. If you can instantly see the query plan for a query, you are far more likely to look at it than if it takes 30 seconds to get that. At that point, you would only do it when you already have a performance problem.

Profiler new feature: Integrating with application frameworks

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT

One of the things that makes working with the profiler easier is the fact that it gives you not just information, but information in context.

I was working with an app using Rhino Service Bus, and it really bothered me that I couldn’t immediately figure out what was the trigger for a session. When using ASP.Net or WCF, the profiler can show the URL that triggered the request, but when we are not using a url based mechanism, that turns out to be much harder.

So I set out to fix that, you can see the results below:

This session was generated by a message batch containing messages for MyBooks, MyQueue, etc.

The integration is composed of two parts, first, from the profiler perspective, you now have the ProfilerIntegration.CurrentSessionContext property, which allows you to customize how the profiler detects the current context.

The second part is the integration from the application framework itself, you can see how I did that for Rhino Service Bus, which will dynamically detect the presence of the profiler and fill the appropriate values. The result makes it a lot easier to track down what is going on.

Say hello to Uber Prof

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT

I got several requests for this, so I am making Uber Prof itself available for purchasing.

What is Uber Prof?

It is a short hand way of saying: All the OR/M profilers that we make.

An Uber Prof license gives you the ability to use:

And it will automatically give you the ability to use any additional profilers that we will create. And yes, there is an upgrade path if you already purchased a single profiler license and would like to upgrade to Uber Prof.