Now it appears that ADBA is going to die on the vine, R2DBC and vertx seem to be pretty good
The “async” frameworks are faster, but I think they might be getting the performance gain not from the async DB API, but from the fact that they don’t block OS threads that are handling frontend HTTP requests. They may be using an async DB API to achieve that, but they *could* (I think) also use traditional JDBC and other general purpose concurrency tools from Java’s standard library. That way would be easier to reason about, in my opinion.
I may just have to write something both ways and wait to get real world experience with it to see how it goes.
Yes, the async framework is faster, but ultimately they have to return something from the database which effectively makes them "block". Postgres can pipeline requests if the client is written correctly so it is conceivable that this would be much faster.