What advantages (if any) does Weblogic 10.0 provide in terms of database connectivity (to any database) over open source or commercial alternatives?
Are there any Weblogic specific gotchas with using a Weblogic database connection?
I'm a J2/JEE, Weblogic newbie so please excuse the simple questions.
Connectivity to any database is accomplished through JDBC drivers; it has nothing to do with WebLogic. If I recall correctly, WebLogic ships with drivers for Oracle, Sybase, and perhaps SQL Server, but you have to add any others that you need.
This is true of all Java EE app servers, commercial or open source.
The value that WebLogic adds is JNDI services and connection pooling. It allows to configure pools so that connections are checked before users are allowed to use them, stale connections are recycled, etc. These are features that would be laborious to code on your own. WebLogic makes it easy to do via configuration.
What advantages (if any) does Weblogic 10.0 provide in terms of database connectivity (to any database) over open source or commercial alternatives?
Weblogic supports clustering of JDBC objects (data sources, connection pools and multipools) and failover and load balancing of JDBC connections and the administration part is very mature. Having that said, I'm sure some other products (some of them, not all) do have equivalent features and wonder if the support of such things can thus be considered as an advantage. All I know is that Weblogic support for these features is really good. Actually, Weblogic is well know for being a rock solid application server and is frequently used for "mission critical" applications. But most applications do not have such needs.
Are there any Weblogic specific gotchas with using a Weblogic database connection?
I'm not sure what you mean by a "weblogic database connection" but AFAIK no.