oracle rdbms connector

[Cantor, Scott]

On 5/20/13 4:06 PM, "Roderick Grau" <rgrau at albany.edu> wrote:

>Our DBAs decided to do some patching this morning and brought our entire
>Shib infrastructure down.  It looks like once the connection pool timed
>out and could not be recreated, Tomcat "paused" the Shib web app until a
>DB connection could be made.

Assuming your database was actually reachable at all, that would usually
mean it thought one or more of the connections was still valid, but was
hung because they weren't. Usually fixing that requires setting options to
do validation queries in various ways.

>Other than the obvious, I need to tell this application owner that they
>need another DB or patch at and outage, how do I fix this?  Is there some
>connection pool options?

A container managed connection means it has nothing to do with Shibboleth
and the options would depend on what you chose to use. I use dbcp, for
example, but I haven't had remote DB connections for years now. At the
time, I had pretty good luck with dbcp and Sybase.

>maxActive="0" and minIdle="0" does not do what you think it would.

That I guess depends what you think they mean, or what the documentation
of whatever software you're using (which isn't Shibboleth) says they mean.

But a hang is rarely a pool size issue unless you have a hard cap on the
pool size. It's a connection management problem. Usually a validation
query option that will timeout quickly is a way to prevent a pool from
reusing hung connections.

-- Scott