Closing a connection

Question

I am using a class DBConnection which has a static method createConnection.I create a connection object like

Connection con=DBConnection.createConnection();

I don't forget to close it along with statements and resultsets.

Now how different is it having the same DBConnection having a normal method createConnection and create a new Connection object like

DBConnection dbConnection=new DBConnection();
Connection con=dBConnection.createConnection();

and ofcourse I don't forget to close the connections,resultset and statement.

Another doubt is does closing a connection mean making it eligible for garbage collection ie. the con variable will now be equal to null?

Answer 1

Calling static method on instance (second example) results in exactly the same as calling the static method without having an instance (first example).

Bear in mind that static method DBConnection.createConnection() creates new instance of the connection anyway (this is so called Factory Method), so in your second example you are creating effectively two instances (dbConnection and con).

Closing doesn't make the instances of connections eligible for GC. Closing simply closes underlying physical connection to RDBMS.