Is Dapper's QueryFirstOrDefault method really slow?

Question

I read that Dapper is faster than EF (at least at retrieving data) and I want to confirm that so I am comparing Dapper and EntityFramework with the help of BenchmarkDotNet.

So I tried this...

    [Benchmark]
    public Player EntityFramework_GetByName()
    {
        using (ApplicationDbContext context = new())
        {
            return context.Players.FirstOrDefault(x => x.FirstName == _name);
        }
    }

    [Benchmark]
    public Player Dapper_GetByName()
    {
        using (SqlConnection conn = new(Database.ConnectionString))
        {
            return conn.QueryFirstOrDefault<Player>($"SELECT * FROM Players WHERE FirstName = '{_name}'");
        }
    }

But the result are not what I expecting...

Then I read here about the column type "problem" and how that can affect the performance, so I change the type of the column to NVarchar with max length of 100 and my code for the Dapper to this

    [Benchmark]
    public Player Dapper_GetByName()
    {
        using (SqlConnection conn = new(Database.ConnectionString))
        {
            return conn.QueryFirstOrDefault<Player>($"SELECT * FROM Players WHERE FirstName = @name", new 
            { @name = new DbString { Value = _name, IsAnsi = false } });
        }
    }

The results of the benchmark tests are the following..

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Allocated
Dapper_GetByName	41,092.8 us	1,400.39 us	4,085.0 us	4 KB
EntityFramework_GetByName	2,971.6 us	305.43 us	895.8 us	110 KB

The difference is very big. Is there a way to improve this?

Answer 1

Uhm, maybe you should not compare

// Open and Close a completely new database connection
using (SqlConnection conn = new(Database.ConnectionString))

vs

// Create a new Unit of Work / Transaction
using (ApplicationDbContext context = new())

Benchmark only the inner part:

return conn.QueryFirstOrDefault<Player>($"SELECT * FROM Players WHERE FirstName = '{_name}'");