Davide Mauri builds out an example of a WebAPI project using Dapper to query Azure SQL Database:
I was able to execute 1100 Requests Per Seconds with a median response time of 20msec. If you can accept a bit higher latency, you can also reach 1500 RPS but the median response time becomes 40msec and the 95 percentile is set at 95msec. Database usage never goes above 20% in such cases…and in fact the bottleneck is the Web App (better, the Web App Plan) and more specifically the CPU. Time to scale up or out the Web App Plan.
By scaling up and out a bit, I was able to reach almost 10.000 request per second with just an HS_Gen5_4. Quite impressive.
I like Dapper as a micro-ORM. Products like it and FSharp.Data.SqlClient are good examples of how you can remove a lot of middleware goop without taking on the performance burdens of Entity Framework and Hibernate.