JDBC techy pooling questions

I have some questions about pooling JDBC connections with the Oracle thin driver. I'm fairly new to JDBC and I'm not familiar with its performance details. My code will be running on a high traffic server with little maintenance. Unfortunately I don't have access to the database to monitor it's load.

I have a wrapper class in my pooling that keeps a Connection instance and a Statement instance together. I am calling Connection.createStatement() once then reusing the Statement. Is it OK to keep reusing one instance of a Statement?

I am disabling auto-commit as recommended by Oracle. Some queries make changes and perform a commit or rollback, but it's possible to execute several thousand read-only queries on various tables without commiting, closing a statement, or closing a connection. Docs imply that auto-commit is for all statements. With auto-commit off, should I call commit() after a batch of read-only queries?

Oracle docs warn that failing to close a connection can cause a permanent resource leak. Is this true in practice? The JDBC docs specify that a Connection will be garbage collected. My code can loose its reference to a Connection instance if an unexpected exception is thrown, such as a RuntimeException or Error.

What part of JDBC holds a cursor? Is is the Connection, the Statement, or just the execution of a query? Quick & dirty Perl code from someone else's project is eating up all the cursors. I'd like to be somewhat immune to temporary shortages while at the same time not being too much of a hog myself.

I have noticed that it's possible for a query to hang forever on Socket.read(). Can I set the Oracle driver to use a timeout? I cache and share data so a stuck query will block any thread asking for the same stuck item.

Thanks!

• Kevin McMurtrie