Please Help ! Exception in closing resultset,statement.

Question

In an application developed on , i am closing the resultsets and statements in finally block as
finally {
     if (resultset != null) resultset .close();
     if (statement != null) statement.close();
the above block does not take care of exceptions that might arise while closing resultset/statement. Please help with this:
what the conditions exceptions may arise in closing resultset/statements.
when does the garbage collector free such resources and what are the implications of not catching exception while closing - can this cause database handle leaks.
Please help!

Answer 1

I don't know what exceptions might occur, but since the close() method can throw SQLException, your program has to catch it. Maybe if you close twice, the second time will throw an exception? Anyway, it doesn't really matter, you still have to write a try-catch around it. What you do there is up to you -- you could ignore it (which is what I do) or you could end the program with a message.
When does the garbage collector free those resources? The garbage collector only frees memory. Nothing else. And the garbage collector will free a ResultSet object only when there are no references to it anywhere in your program. That doesn't mean just in code that you wrote, but anywhere in code that's running in your program. For example, the Statement object that produced the ResultSet might hold a reference to it. However, the API documentation for ResultSet does say that when the garbage collector does free a ResultSet object, it will automatically close it.
However, the best practice is to close ResultSet and Statement objects when you are finished with them, and not rely on garbage collection to clean up after you.