JAVA JDBC reusing connections

Question

I have a Java program in which I am doing some JDBC for select queries. Will it be advisable to call testDataBase() each time which inturns calls DBConnection() each time or I should reuse one connection for all the queries. Thanks in advance.

private  void testDataBase(String query){
    Connection con = DBConnection();
    Statement st = null;
    ResultSet rs = null;

    try {
        st = con.createStatement();
        rs = st.executeQuery(query);
        boolean flag = true;
        while (rs.next()) {
            String resultString = "";
            for(int i = 1; i <=rs.getMetaData().getColumnCount();i++){
                resultString=resultString+" "+  rs.getString(i);
            }
            System.out.println(resultString);
        }
    } catch (SQLException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();

    } finally {
        if (st != null) {
            try {
                st.close();
            } catch (SQLException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        if (rs != null) {
            try {
                rs.close();
            } catch (SQLException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        if (con != null) {
            try {
                con.close();
            } catch (SQLException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
}               



private  Connection DBConnection() {
    final String method_name =  "DBConnection";
    Connection conn = null;
    try{
      Class.forName(driver).newInstance();
      conn = java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(url,userName,password);

    }catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    } catch (SQLException e) {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    } catch (InstantiationException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return conn;
}

Answer 1

Opening a DB connection is an expensive operation in terms of perfofmance. You should use a ConnectionPool for sharing connections among different requests.

Answer 2

Connections are not thread safe, so sharing them across requests is not a good idea.

A better idea is to pool connections and keep their scope as narrow as possible: check the connection out of the pool, use it, close it in transaction scope.