Connection management is important to application performance. Optimize your application by connecting once and using multiple statement objects, instead of performing multiple connections. Avoid connecting to a data source after establishing an initial connection.
Although gathering driver information at connect time is a good practice, it is often more efficient to gather it in one step rather than two steps. For example, some applications establish a connection and then call a method in a separate component that reattaches and gathers information about the driver. Applications that are designed as separate entities should pass the established connection object to the data collection routine instead of establishing a second connection.
Another bad practice is to connect and disconnect several times throughout your application to perform SQL statements. Connection objects can have multiple statement objects associated with them. Statement objects, which are defined to be memory storage for information about SQL statements, can manage multiple SQL statements.
You can improve performance significantly with connection pooling, especially for applications that connect over a network or through the World Wide Web. Connection pooling lets you reuse connections. Closing connections does not close the physical connection to the database. When an application requests a connection, an active connection is reused, thus avoiding the network input/output needed to create a new connection.
Connection and statement handling should be addressed before implementation. Spending time and thoughtfully handling connection management improves application performance and maintainability.
