Why MyBatis-Flex Beats MyBatis-Plus: Features, Benchmarks, and Quick Start Guide

What is MyBatis-Flex?

MyBatis-Flex is an elegant enhancement framework for MyBatis. It is extremely lightweight, has very high performance, and provides great flexibility, allowing developers to connect to any database with minimal SQL writing and reduced error risk.

Overall, MyBatis-Flex greatly improves development efficiency and experience, freeing developers to focus on business logic.

Features of MyBatis-Flex

Lightweight: No third‑party dependencies or interceptors; implemented via SqlProvider with no SQL parsing, resulting in high performance, easy debugging, and strong control.

Flexible: Supports CRUD and pagination directly on entities, and offers Db+Row tools for operations without entity classes. The built‑in QueryWrapper simplifies multi‑table, join, and sub‑query scenarios.

Powerful: Supports any relational database with extensible dialects, multi‑primary keys, logical deletion, optimistic locking, data masking, audit, fill, field encryption, field permissions, multi‑tenant, dynamic table names, dynamic schemas, and more.

Comparison with Similar Frameworks

Feature Comparison

Basic CRUD: supported by MyBatis-Flex, MyBatis‑Plus, Fluent‑MyBatis.

Pagination and total‑count cache: supported by MyBatis-Flex and MyBatis‑Plus, not by Fluent‑MyBatis.

SQL‑free pagination design: supported by MyBatis-Flex, not by MyBatis‑Plus.

Multi‑table queries (joins, unions): fully supported by MyBatis-Flex, limited or unsupported by the others.

Logical deletion, optimistic lock, audit, data fill, data masking, field encryption, field permissions: supported by MyBatis-Flex; some features require paid versions in MyBatis‑Plus.

QueryWrapper RPC transmission: supported by MyBatis-Flex, not by MyBatis‑Plus.

Performance Comparison

Single‑record query speed is about 5‑10× faster than MyBatis‑Plus.

Querying 10 records is about 5‑10× faster than MyBatis‑Plus.

Pagination query speed is about 5‑10× faster than MyBatis‑Plus.

Data update speed is about 5‑10× faster than MyBatis‑Plus.

For detailed benchmark results, see https://mybatis-flex.com/zh/intro/benchmark.html .

Supported Databases

MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle (11g and 12c), DB2, HSQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, SQLServer (2005 and later)

DM, Xugu, KingbaseES, Phoenix (HBase), Gauss, ClickHouse, GBase, GBase‑8s, OceanBase, Firebird, Derby, HighGo, CUBRID, Goldilocks, CSIIDB, SAP_HANA, Impala, Vertica, Redshift, OpenGauss, TDengine, Informix, Greenplum, UXDB

Quick Start

Step 1: Create a database table

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `tb_account` (
    `id` INTEGER PRIMARY KEY auto_increment,
    `user_name` VARCHAR(100),
    `age` INTEGER,
    `birthday` DATETIME
);

INSERT INTO tb_account(id, user_name, age, birthday) VALUES
    (1, '张三', 18, '2020-01-11'),
    (2, '李四', 19, '2021-03-21');

Step 2: Create a Spring Boot project and add Maven dependencies

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.mybatis-flex</groupId>
        <artifactId>mybatis-flex-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
        <version>1.5.3</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.mysql</groupId>
        <artifactId>mysql-connector-j</artifactId>
        <scope>runtime</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.zaxxer</groupId>
        <artifactId>HikariCP</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <!-- for test only -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Step 3: Configure the data source in application.yml

# DataSource Config
spring:
  datasource:
    url: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/flex_test
    username: root
    password: 12345678

Add @MapperScan("com.mybatisflex.test.mapper") to the Spring Boot main class.

@SpringBootApplication
@MapperScan("com.mybatisflex.test.mapper")
public class MybatisFlexTestApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(MybatisFlexTestApplication.class, args);
    }
}

Step 4: Define the entity and mapper

@Data
@Table("tb_account")
public class Account {
    @Id(keyType = KeyType.Auto)
    private Long id;
    private String userName;
    private Integer age;
    private Date birthday;
}

public interface AccountMapper extends BaseMapper<Account> {
}

Step 5: Use the framework

@SpringBootTest
class MybatisFlexTestApplicationTests {
    @Autowired
    private AccountMapper accountMapper;

    @Test
    void contextLoads() {
        QueryWrapper queryWrapper = QueryWrapper.create()
                .select()
                .where(ACCOUNT.AGE.eq(18));
        Account account = accountMapper.selectOneByQuery(queryWrapper);
        System.out.println(account);
    }
}

The console output will show the retrieved Account object, confirming that MyBatis‑Flex works as expected.

For more details and code generation tools, visit https://mybatis-flex.com/zh/others/codegen.html and the official site https://mybatis-flex.com/ .