Servlet Database Connections

Question

Hello all, i have a servlet that gets a new database connection everytime doPost(..) is called, and closes the connection and the end of the method. What would be best bearing in mind that i want it to be able to handle as many concurrent requests as possible without it falling over...
1) this way
2) Have is so when the servlet is instatiated a connection is made, and everytime its used it's tested to see if it is still open
3) Have some exteral managment (like hibernate) for pooling of connections
4) something else?
Thanks for any help!
Dori

Answer 1

Use connection pooling.
You don't necessarily use Hibernate for this. It does in fact also nothing with connection pooling, it is just another ORM framework. You can just use the connection pooling facility provided by a decent appserver. Just consult its JNDI resources/datasources documentation for details. If you are for example using Tomcat, here is such a doc: [http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/jndi-datasource-examples-howto.html]. Good luck.
That said, option 2 is a very, very bad idea. When a connection is kept open that long time in the servlet, the DB will timeout and close it sooner or later and your application will gracefully crash.