How to Convert foor loop to NHibernate Futures for performance - nhibernate

Question

NHibernate Version: 3.4.0.4000
I'm currently working on optimizing our code so that we can reduce the number of round trips to the database and am looking at a for loop that is one of the culprits. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to batch all of these iterations into a future that gets executed once when sent to SQL Server. Essentially each iteration of the loop causes 2 queries to hit the database!
foreach (var choice in lineItem.LineItemChoices)
{
choice.OptionVersion = _session.Query<OptionVersion>().Where(x => x.Option.Id == choice.OptionId).OrderByDescending(x => x.OptionVersionNumber).FirstOrDefault();
choice.ChoiceVersion = _session.Query<ChoiceVersion>().OrderByDescending(x => x.ChoiceVersionIdentity.ChoiceVersionNumber).Where(x => x.Choice.Id == choice.ChoiceId).FirstOrDefault();
}

Answer 1

One option is to extract OptionId and ChoiceId from all the LineItemChoices into two lists in local memory. Then issue just two queries, one for options and one for choices, giving these lists in .Where(x => optionIds.Contains(x.Option.Id)). This corresponds to SQL IN operator. This requires some postprocessing. You will get two result lists (transform to dictionary or lookup if you expect many results), that you need to process to populate the choice objects. This postprocessing is local and tends to be very cheap compared to database roundtrips. This option can be a bit tricky if the existing FirstOrDefault part is absolutely necessary. Do you expect there to be more than result for a single optionId? If not, this code could instead have used SingleOrDefault, which could just be dropped if converting to use IN-queries.
The other option is to use futures (https://nhibernate.info/doc/nhibernate-reference/performance.html#performance-future). For Linq it means to use ToFuture or ToFutureValue at the end, which also conflicts with FirstOrDefault I believe. The important thing is that you need to loop over all line item choices to initialize ALL queries BEFORE you access the value of any of them. So this is likely to also result in some postprocessing, where you would first store the future values in some list, and then in a second loop access the real value from each query to populate the line item choice.
If you to expect that the queries can yield more than one result (before applying FirstOrDefault), I think you can just use Take(1) instead, as that will still return an IQueryable where you can apply the future method.
The first option is probably the most efficient, since it will just be two queries and allow the database engine to make just one pass over the tables.
Keep the limit on the maximum number of parameters that can be given in an SQL query in mind. If there can be thousands of line item choices, you may need to split them in batches and query for at most 2000 identifiers per round trip.

Answer 2

Adding on the Oskar answer, NHibernate Futures was implement in NHibernate 2.1. It is available on method Future for collections and FutureValue for single values.
In your case, you could separate the IDs of the list in memory ...
var optionIds = lineItem.LineItemChoices.Select(x => x.OptionId);
var choiceIds = lineItem.LineItemChoices.Select(x => x.ChoiceId);
... and execute two queries using Future<T> to get two lits in one hit over the database.
var optionVersions = _session.Query<OptionVersion>()
.Where(x => optionIds.Contains(x.Option.Id))
.OrderByDescending(x => x.OptionVersionNumber)
.Future<OptionVersion>();
var choiceVersions = _session.Query<ChoiceVersion>()
.Where(x => choiceIds.Contains(x.Choice.Id))
.OrderByDescending(x => x.ChoiceVersionIdentity.ChoiceVersionNumber)
.Future<ChoiceVersion>();
After with all you need in memory, you could loop on the original collection you have and search in memory the data to fill up the choice object.
foreach (var choice in lineItem.LineItemChoices)
{
choice.OptionVersion = optionVersions.OrderByDescending(x => x.OptionVersionNumber).FirstOrDefault(x => x.Option.Id == choice.OptionId);
choice.ChoiceVersion = choiceVersions.OrderByDescending(x => x.ChoiceVersionIdentity.ChoiceVersionNumber).FirstOrDefault(x => x.Choice.Id == choice.ChoiceId);
}