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INFO: Frequently Asked Questions About ODBC Connection Pooling

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Summary

This article covers some of the most frequently asked questions about ODBC connection pooling.

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More information

  1. Q. What is ODBC connection pooling?

    A. Connection pooling is one the new features introduced in ODBC 3.0. Connection pooling enables an ODBC application to reuse a connection from a pool of connections. Once a connection has been created and placed in the pool, an ODBC application can reuse the same driver and the connection within the same shared environment (henv) without performing the complete connection process. However, a connection can never be reused between different henv or different drivers.
  2. Q. Can I use connection pooling with 2.x ODBC drivers?

    A. Connection pooling is implemented in the ODBC driver manager version 3.0 or later. The driver version does not matter.
  3. Q. Can I enable connection pooling with the Microsoft Access driver because the connection pooling is implemented in the driver manager?

    A. You can enable connection pooling for Microsoft Access driver. Microsoft Access uses Jet, and Jet is thread safe starting from Jet 4.0. From MDAC 2.1 and later, you can have connection pooling for Access ODBC driver.
  4. Q. How do I enable connection pooling in an ODBC application?

    A. An ODBC application can call SQLSetEnvAttr with the SQL_ATTR_CONNECTION_POOLING attribute to enable connection pooling. For more information about how to enable connection pooling in an ODBC application, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
    164221 How to Enable Connection Pooling in an ODBC Application
  5. Q. How do I enable connection pooling if the application is written in Visual Basic?

    A. A Visual Basic or ODBC application can call the SQLSetEnvAttr function to enable connection pooling. Connection pooling is a process-level attribute, so any subsequent connection made through the ODBC driver manager in the Visual Basic application will use connection pooling. A Visual Basic application can use the function declaration and code to enable connection pooling.
          Declare Function SQLSetEnvAttr Lib "odbc32.dll" (ByVal henv As Long,
      ByVal Attribute As Long, ByVal Value As Long, ByVal StringLength As
      Long) As Integer

      ' env attribute
      Public Const SQL_ATTR_CONNECTION_POOLING = 201
      Public Const SQL_ATTR_CP_MATCH = 202

      ' values for SQL_ATTR_CONNECTION_POOLING
      Public Const SQL_CP_ONE_PER_DRIVER = 1
      Public Const SQL_IS_UINTEGER = -5

      nstatus = SQLSetEnvAttr(0, SQL_ATTR_CONNECTION_POOLING,
      SQL_CP_ONE_PER_DRIVER, SQL_IS_UINTEGER)
      SQLAllocEnv...
      SQLAllocConnect...
      SQLConnect...
      SQLDisConnect...
      SQLFreeConnect...
      SQLFreeEnv...
    For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
    237844 HOWTO: Enable ODBC Connection Pooling in VB ADO Application
    228843 HOWTO: Implement Session Pooling from Visual Basic ADO Program
  6. Q. How do I enable connection pooling in an OLE DB application?

    A. An OLE DB application can call SQLSetEnvAttr to enable connection pooling.

    For more information about how to enable connection pooling in an OLE DB application, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
    166083 How to Enable Connection Pooling in an OLE DB Application
  7. Q. How do I enable connection pooling for Active Server Pages (ASP) or ActiveX Data Objects (ADO)?

    A. Microsoft Internet Information server (IIS) version 3.0 with Active Server Pages takes advantage of connection pooling. You can enable connection pooling for IIS users by changing the value of StartConnectionPool to 1. The StartConnectionPool is located under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC\ASP \Parameters.
  8. Q. How do I limit the number of connections in the pool?

    A. The number of connections in the pool is controlled by the ODBC driver manager. ODBC applications cannot control it.
  9. Q. How do I monitor how many connections are in the pool?

    A. You can monitor the connections in the connection pool.For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
    216950 How to Enable ODBC Connection Pooling Performance Counters
    238442 ODBC Connection Pooling Object Disappears from PerfMon
    245543 INFO: ODBC Connection Pooling Counters in Performance Monitor
  10. Q. How do I clear out the connections in the pool?

    A. How long a connection remains in the pool depends on the CPTimeout property of the ODBC driver. When the timeout expires, the connection will be closed and removed from the pool. The ODBC application can use SQLConfigDriver to change the value of CPTimeout, and this value applies to all the ODBC applications that are using the specified ODBC driver. The default value for the CPTimeout is 60 seconds.
  11. Q. Do I have to explicitly enable connection pooling if my application is running in Microsoft Transaction Server?

    A. If you are going through an ODBC driver to an ODBC data source, Microsoft Transaction Server will enable connection pooling; you do not have to explicitly enable connection pooling.
  12. Q. What if a connection in the pool goes bad? Will the ODBC driver manager be able to detect it ?

    A. ODBC 3.0 hands over a bad connection without checking whether the connection is bad or not. With Service Pack 1, the driver manager will detect a bad connection. If a connection in the pool is bad, the driver manager will detect it and return a good connection. If the driver manager is not able to create a good connection, it will return an error message.
  13. Q. With ODBC 3.0 Service Pack 1, will the ODBC driver manager try to connect to the database server repeatedly when the server is not available?

    A. ODBC 3.0 Service Pack 1 introduced a new API, ODBCSetTryWaitValue, to prevent the ODBC driver manager from connecting to an unavailable server repeatedly. ODBCSetTryWaitValue takes a DWORD parameter and saves the information in the registry at the following location:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Odbc\Odbcinst.ini \ODBC Connection Pooling\Retry Wait
    Once the diver manager detects a bad database server, it returns an error message and marks the connection with the time. From that point until the RetryWait value expires, the driver manager returns a failure without trying to reconnect to the database server.

    For more information about how to use the ODBCSetTryWaitValue ODBC API, see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
    168250 IIS Performance Degrades with a Bad Connection

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References

For more information about connection pooling and session pooling, see the following Microsoft Web site:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810829.aspx

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Keywords: kbdatabase, kbgrpdsmdac, kbinfo, kbmdac250, kbmdac260, kbmdac270, kbodbc, kboledb, kbusage, kbvbp, kbgrpdsvcdb, KB169470

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Article Info
Article ID : 169470
Revision : 6
Created on : 2/15/2007
Published on : 2/15/2007
Exists online : False
Views : 618