With all respect to Kevins benchmarks. There are many ways to measure performance and most of them are wrong. If you see the talk he even admit that his numbers changed quite a bit between each benchmark run.

From what we see, we are generally faster than raw SQLite on all metrics except when doing batch inserts. This is primarily an API problem, because our low-level access is 200-300% faster than SQLite (which Kevin also mentions). It is something we are well aware of and plan to address quickly after 1.0: https://github.com/realm/realm-java/issues/1684

Our own numbers are here: http://www.slideshare.net/ChristianMelchior/realm-building-a... including a link to the code

We definitely recommend everyone make their own benchmarks, reflective of their own use-cases. Kevin (who was deeply involved in OrmLite) made a great contribution to this community effort with that post, but we still see many people on iOS — and on Android — experiencing massive speedups when moving to Realm. Hence us saying “usually faster” because that’s reflective of what people tell us in aggregate, although some microbenchmarks will always disagree. As always, your mileage may vary, and we trust people to make their own opinion of Realm’s performance, ease of use, and anything else we try to focus on.

It's worse than just that. They claim it's a "replacement" (!) for SQLite. That is an incredibly bold claim. From what I've gathered about Realm it isn't the same type of database as SQLite at all: Object store versus relational tables.

Realm is still pretty fast. A simple comparison of Realm with Swift libraries for SQLite: https://github.com/groue/GRDB.swift/wiki/Performance

Great link, and the presentation slides are great. Thanks for sharing.