Java Enterprise Best Practices

Leverage Proprietary Connection Properties

Java has conditioned us to embrace open, generic standards and shy away from technology-specific tools. The JDBC API, however, allows databases to specify options that enable you to optimize the functionality of your database applications without impacting their openness. These options are called connection properties.

Every JDBC driver comes with a set of connection properties that allow you to specially configure it. Put another way, they allow you to tell the driver a bit about your application so that it can efficiently communicate with the database on the other side. These properties answer common JDBC questions, such as how big the result sets tend to be, which sorting rules should be used, and how long the driver should wait for information from the database before timing out. The properties that are available to you, and how they are best set, depend extensively on the database you are using and how your application is using that database. However, you should always take advantage of these properties in a production environment.

The two most common methods of specifying connection properties are to hardcode them when you configure your data source, or to place them inside a driver manager resource file. However, the following code snippets show a simpler way to keep your code free of platform-dependent property strings: use the system properties hashtable to embed the connection properties.

First, pass the system properties into the ...