Thursday, June 12, 2008

Database connection: static or non-static?

I believe this is quite common question of all developers, that use databases in applications. I’ve seen a lot mistakes regarding this choice.
Is it better to create one static connection and use it thru all the code, or during each database call create new connection object?

The answers are:
In case of DB server (stand-alone database like SQL Server Express/Standard/Enterprise or Oracle) it is always better to create and dispose new connection objects, because almost all db drivers (like ADO.NET, ODBC, Oracle) have such feature as connection pooling and you won’t experience benefits of keeping one connection alive. Static connection can even decrease performance, because in multithreading application single connection object cannot be used simultaneously. Also static connections decrease scalability of applications. Usually connection pooling performs better than your custom code that tries to re-use created connections. There is always exceptions from this situation: if you are going to execute number of SQL statements sequentially, it would be mistake to create new connection for each new statement!

In case of embedded databases (like SQL Server CE) it is better to use static connection, because such kind of databases does not have connection pooling and connection re-creation usually costs a lot.

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