How to re-use a PreparedStatement from poolled connections?

Question

Consider poolled connections....
one advantage of poolled connections are resource sharing...preventing the system from creating lots of connections or from creating and destroying similar connections.
Connection and thread pools are specially usefull on multi-threaded servers.
Consider now an application that has a service that logs the number of times a user has connected.
This service is thread-safe, it is synchronized (bad) or it doesn�t have state (good).
Every time a thead is started in this service a connection is requested from the pool que the service finish logging it needs to release the connection back to the pool.
This is done automatically by the Connection wrapper. When we do conn.close(); actually the wrapper is releasing the connection so that other threads and services can use it.
Suppose the log service uses this PreparedStatement: "Update users set accessCount=accessCount+1 where userId=?"
Because we are using connection pooling, every time the service is requested we possibly get a different connection object. Then, we can�t store a PreparedStatement object locally.
If we use a conn.prepareStatement, then we are creating a new PreparedStatement on every request. Isn�t it? Then, we are not able to re-use PreparedStatements.
Does anyone know a pratical way to re-use PreparedStatements in a multi-threaded server? In my case, this is a servlet.
Thanks

Answer 1

I can only speak about DB2 on the ISeries (AS/400) but to get the benifits of prepared statments it is not required to leave the preperedstatment object open. The first time a prepared statment is prepared against a connection: it takes a significant amount of time, subsiquent prepares for exactly the same SQL take practically no time.
It may be different on with your database and driver but you should have a test!
So if this is the case it is not a problem to create and close a prepared statment with every request, you will get the preformance increase after the 1st time the statment is prepared against the connection in question.
Hope this helps!