The day has finally arrived and we’re excited to announce LightSpeed 5. The worlds best .NET ORM just got even better!
Here’s a run down on some of the best improvements. Keep in mind that the change log for LightSpeed is the longest we’ve ever had so these are just the highlights — there is awesomeness sprinkled everywhere.
LightSpeed already had one of the fastest query generation processes of any .NET ORM but now we support Compiled Queries also. Compiled Queries mean that we can side step the cost of query generation almost entirely on subsequent queries where only variables change (e.g. ‘SELECT name FROM user WHERE Id = {ID}’).
Lets take a peek at how this compares between LightSpeed 4 and LightSpeed 5
Pretty impressive! 59% performance improvement in simple queries.
Of course LightSpeed has always been pretty impressive compared to what’s out there. Here’s those same numbers in comparison to Entity Framework.
You can see why software professionals pick LightSpeed. It’s not just significantly more efficient in querying, but it is also a lot easier to use and saves you valuable development hours (the many hours saved not shown in the graphs!)
Compiled queries are a cool new addition. You know what else is cool? When they get applied automatically! We’ve made sure that if you call FindById, for example, LightSpeed will internally create a compiled query so all your fetches by Id automatically go faster.
Along with automatically occurring with FindById, LightSpeed will use this technique when walking lazy loaded collections (e.g. User.Posts would use a compiled query). This means when you’re doing simple things like walking collections you’re going at maximum speed.
More speed, automatically!
We’ve included a new SQL Server 2012 data provider. This is great because we already had support for all the modern data types like SQLGeography, HierarchyID and CLR Types and now you can use LightSpeed to natively target SQL Server 2012 including leveraging the new SEQUENCE support for identity generation.
The LightSpeed Designer has been improved to help new users. It will now do nice things like offer to create a KeyTable for you if you don’t have one setup but are using the KeyTable identity type. A common speed bump for new users that we wanted to clear up.
You can also display table data for a given entity directly within Visual Studio. This helps avoid needing to fire up SQL Management Studio or other tool to see your data.
For those of you who have not worked with a Visual Studio integrated designer that doesn’t suck, you’ll find the LightSpeed Designer a breath of fresh air. It has database-first and model-first design support, smart filtering, works with a bunch of different databases and much more. You can read more about designer specific features here.
There are several other improvements to make the designer more robust, provide better error messages and improve database syncing.
You’ll love how easy LightSpeed is to use and won’t look back. If you’ve never used LightSpeed you can grab the forever free version and give it a test drive!
Existing customers with active subscriptions already have LightSpeed 5 available from their accounts.
LightSpeed
Web Workbench
WPF Diagrams
WPF Elements
As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.
Web Workbench
LightSpeed
WPF Elements
Metro Elements
As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.
LightSpeed
Web Workbench
WPF Elements
WPF Diagrams
Metro Elements
As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.
BOOM! That’s the sound of the worlds best .NET ORM getting a major update! :-)
We’re excited to be announcing the immediate availability of the LightSpeed 5 Beta.
We have a big list of addition, changes and bug fixes so for now I’m just going to highlight some key differences in this post. In January we’ll be running a series on the major features when the final version is released.
Compiled Queries
Compiled queries allow you to speed up querying by having LightSpeed pre-parse the expression and get it ready for sending to the database. This provides a great speed up on repeated queries even if the parameter values change.
Then we got to thinking.
What if common queries (e.g. fetch by Id and others) were always pre-compiled behind the scenes?
What we found was huge: the performance benefits were great. This led us to turning on compiled queries for certain queries by default so you don’t need to use the compiled queries syntax. This resulted in a 60% performance boost. Free performance gain for all LightSpeed users — always a good thing. Especially good since LightSpeed is already blazingly fast!
Note: Posting any sort of performance comparison typically results in howls about how unfair they are or unrealistic but this highlights the speed of LightSpeed’s querying engine for a simple case. Suffice to say, LightSpeed does awesomely in complex scenarios also :-)
Database provider changes
We are working towards allowing end users to implement their own database providers and to allow support for mobile scenarios, to that end we have made some under the hood changes to the provider infrastructure in 5.0 as well as refreshing our supported providers.
Of note:
Visual Studio 2012 Support
We have had this in the nightly builds most of this year, but it’s worth mentioning again – LightSpeed 5 ships with full designer support for Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008.
Additionally we have dropped the .NET 2.0 only compatibility build of LightSpeed so that LightSpeed can more directly make use of .NET 3.5 features in the core runtime.
Ever improved querying
We have continued iterating our querying support since 4.0 RTM with the core runtime now supporting HAVING expressions and more advanced sub-queries. For LINQ we have improved our handling of more complicated grouping queries and use of sub-queries to support staged query construction using IQueryable. The core runtime now also exposes a RawSql property on the query object to allow arbitrary SQL to be expressed where previously stored procedures or FindBySql would need to be used – this allows joining on an arbitrary SQL statement to handle situations where you need to explicitly control the SQL being emitted.
Small acorns
Whether it’s the ability to get an offending Validation rule when checking an entity is valid, or get more details about your entities using the LightSpeed.Meta framework, you’ll find something to delight you with LightSpeed 5. We look forward to hearing your feedback on the beta and we can’t wait to get LightSpeed 5 final out early in 2013!
The LightSpeed 5 Beta is now available to all active customers, and you can download this from your My Account page now!
Non-customers will have the 5 release in very early 2013 (or you can upgrade from LightSpeed 4 Free Edition and get the beta).
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