Dear apache-commons developers,

Jdbc2PoolDataSource is a very useful component however I believe it is not up to 
"release" quality yet
While working with it I found some things I would like to improve or change. 
Please forgive me if I misunderstood certain things in Jdbc2PoolDataSource design as I 
could only spend limited time testing, debugging and reading its source

1. mutable poolable keys are very dangerous and lead to errors. One subtle error which 
rendered entire component useless in case of getConnection(username, password) was due 
to this error http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13235

2. new pool gets created for every different user getConnection(username, password). 
Also due to pool design if user wants eviction each pool will span an eviction thread 
which can easily bring any server to its knees. I think creating new pool for each 
user is related to ability to configure each user separately. My believe it is really 
not an objective because a) as much as possible in their projects people should use 
pools which are fully configured and do not use getConnection(username, password) but 
getConnection() instead and b) if they do need pool which caters for application where 
username/password is supplied by user for each session rather then configured in 
application this pool should have no reason to configure different users differently 
(as it has no prior knowledge of its users)
Also for this kind of pool it is important to be efficient as number of users can be 
very high
and we should be extra careful to survive programming mistakes or malicious users in 
this case

3. In current implementation once a pool for particular user/password got created and 
have some idle connection a user with INVALID password but right user name can grab 
connections from the pool (have not tested but it looks like it is the case)

4. failed connections get suck in active pool

5. Not sure why we need to keep a static map of all pools by datasource. J2EE 
environment will call jndi environment getObjectInstance() only once to create a pool 
and then the environment will keep the reference and will not call factory method on 
each object lookup but return previously created instance

6. weak cache of UserPassKeys by PooledConnections. if PooledConnections re-implements 

7. XA interface?

As an exercise (and because I need it ASAP for my projects) I re-implemented 
Jdbc2PoolDataSource (well I just wrote it from scratch yesterday). It is also based on 
commons-pool component and I tried to take in the consideration some of the issues I 
mentioned above. It is an RND/alpha level code and not all features are implemented 
but I am planning to finalize it shortly (actually it depends on pool latest features 
invalidateObject() and doEvict()) as I need it for my production. I expect to get it 
to beta quality in couple of weeks. I would be glad to contribute it to apache if 
there is any interest. 

some features:

- getConnection(username, wrong-password) will not affect pools for the same user name 
and valid password and will not be able to utilize them either 
- UserKey objects are immutable and cached in a map (HashMap right now but it could be 
apache's LRUMap to make sure it does not grow indefinitely)
- Bad connections do not get stuck in active pool
- Connections are marked bad based on 
ConnectionEventListener.connectionErrorOccurred() and get removed from a pool on next 
activate/passivate
- On getConnection() if any idle connection is bad it will be destroyed and another 
attempt to get connection made transparently for user. It will be done till a good 
connection is obtained but not more than idleNum+1 attempts to be made (tested with 
oracle)
- Use shared eviction thread across multiple pools. This has not been implemented yet. 
I am planning to allow pool to have setTimer(Timer timer) or setTimerName(String 
jndiName) which will subscribe pool to receive time events from  a timer. In j2ee 
environment timer should be defined in context environment and looked up by jndi name. 
Timer could be custom developed or preferable java.util.Timer (although as Rodney 
mentioned it requires jdk1.3)
- Optionally prohibit getConnection(username, password) allow getConnection() only 
(could be important for XA vs. local transactions) not implemented yet

and more...


Thank you very much for your attention

Alex Roytman
Peace Technology, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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