CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javajakarta-ee
Miller
Miller

Reputation: 491

Java database connection

I've been approached by a programmer that has background in Oracle forms and is moving into the Java realm. He asked me a question that I didn't have a good answer for. Instead of answering that; I always do it that way or that's how I was taught. I figured I'd do some research.

Question: With Java multi-thread capabilities; why don't you setup a JDBC connection to the database for each user, each on it's own thread? Instead of setting up a connection pool and applying security to which users can access the pool?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 378

Answers (2)

nwinkler
nwinkler

Reputation: 54437

A connection pool scales better. If you have a dedicated connection per user, you will need 50 connections for 50 users. With a pool, you can probably do with something like 10 - 20 connections to handle the 50 users (depending on the use case). Now take a look at a bigger group and think about handling 500, 5000 or 50000 users and you will see that the 1 connection per user model does not scale.

With a connection pool (and a thread pool), each request will still be handled by one thread and by one database connection, but they will be taken from a pool instead of a dedicated one per user.

Upvotes: 3

Brad
Brad

Reputation: 15879

Because the overhead of maintaining a lot of threads is not efficient. What happens when there are more users than your application server or database can maintain? What happens when there's a lot of contention on a database table?

By using a connection pool, you're not having to "connect" to the database again from scratch so you get a big performance boost from re-using database connections from a pool.

Something like Apache's DBCP is a good place to start if you're not using an application server.

Upvotes: 1

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