The normal JDBC idiom is to acquire and close the Connection
(and also Statement
and ResultSet
) in the shortest possible scope, i.e. in the very same try-finally
block of the method as you're executing the query. You should not hold the connection open all the time. The DB will timeout and reclaim it sooner or later. In MySQL it's by default after 8 hours.
To improve connecting performance you should really consider using a connection pool, like c3p0 (here's a developer guide). Note that even when using a connection pool, you still have to write proper JDBC code: acquire and close all the resources in the shortest possible scope. The connection pool will in turn worry about actually closing the connection or just releasing it back to pool for further reuse.
Here's a kickoff example how your method retrieving a list of entities from the DB should look like:
public List<Entity> list() throws SQLException {
// Declare resources.
Connection connection = null;
Statement statement = null;
ResultSet resultSet = null;
List<Entity> entities = new ArrayList<Entity>();
try {
// Acquire resources.
connection = database.getConnection();
statement = connection.createStatement("SELECT id, name, value FROM entity");
resultSet = statement.executeQuery();
// Gather data.
while (resultSet.next()) {
Entity entity = new Entity();
entity.setId(resultSet.getLong("id"));
entity.setName(resultSet.getString("name"));
entity.setValue(resultSet.getInteger("value"));
entities.add(entity);
}
} finally {
// Close resources in reversed order.
if (resultSet != null) try { resultSet.close(); } catch (SQLException logOrIgnore) {}
if (statement != null) try { statement.close(); } catch (SQLException logOrIgnore) {}
if (connection != null) try { connection.close(); } catch (SQLException logOrIgnore) {}
}
// Return data.
return entities;
}
See also: