With those numbers that's an understandable assumption on your part, but as it turns out the dev team did learn its lesson from your helpful pointers around the time we launched for iOS…

I just checked our Android code and we are reusing compiled statements in our benchmarks (Inserts only since compiled statements are not available for multi-column queries, afawk). Here’s the code we use for inserts:

    public void testBatchInserts() throws PerformanceTestException {
        SQLiteStatement stmt = db.compileStatement("INSERT INTO "
                + EmployeeDatabaseHelper.TABLE_EMPLOYEES + " VALUES(?1, ?2, ?3, ?4)");

        db.beginTransaction();
        for (int row = 0; row < getNumInserts(); row++) {
            stmt.clearBindings();
            stmt.bindString(2, getEmployeeName(row));
            stmt.bindLong(3, getEmployeeAge(row));
            stmt.bindLong(4, getEmployeeHiredStatus(row));
            stmt.executeInsert();
        }
        db.setTransactionSuccessful();
        db.endTransaction();
    }

So there you go: no intention to mislead. Us overlooking prepared statements when we originally benched iOS was definitely a regrettable error but we do try to improve. Thanks for helping us along the way.

Glad to hear it! Guess it's more surprises between platforms :| Given that, I'm even more interested in the Android version, and definitely curious what the source code looks like - that's a respectable speedup, you must be doing something right.

Would you have the source code for the benchmarks available somewhere? On the iOS post there was a link, but I didn't see it on the android one.

That was a totally 100% fair point you made when we launched for iOS, and something we had completely overlooked. Your comment immediately prompted us to update our bench code to reuse compiled statements and, we’ve been using updated charts to document our iOS performance since then (e.g.: https://speakerdeck.com/timanglade/realm-overview-at-the-sil...). See other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390541) regarding our performance on Android — we do reuse compiled statements.

EDIT: typos.

EDIT 2: clearly referencing that this message was about iOS and pointing to the other comment for Android.

Cool, thanks! I've mostly been looking at the iOS announcement page, which hasn't changed - harder to track down other materials you've used for promotion :/ Not that an old blog post is a great barometer of such things, of course.

Thanks again for looking into it and updating the material - far too many groups just gloss over (glaring) problems with their micro benchmarks, and it just sours all their future claims. Glad you're not one of them :)