BEA WebLogic Server™ Administration Kit

Connection Pools

When writing an application that interacts with a database, the obvious strategy from a programmer's viewpoint is to create and destroy connections on an as-needed basis. Closer inspection, however, reveals this strategy to be a wellspring of performance problems. Even if the application and the data source are located on the same physical machine, the handshaking between the database and the application that occurs is time consuming and expensive in terms of server resources.

When, as is commonly the case, the database connection must be made across a network, the problem is compounded. Besides the fact that communication across a network is dramatically slower than communication among processes on a local machine, you must ...