Managing Connections for optimal performance question, switch from Oracle to SQL

I was told in one of my systems classes that the real performance bottleneck in accessing information from the database was the opening of a connection from the application to the database.

To combat that problem I was advised to use a Singleton Factory pattern and to have that Factory instaniate a connection and open it, then pass references to that connection for all of the objects that it created. All of those objects passed the connection reference to the objects they created and so on. Basically that meant that I only ever had one connection open at any one time for my entire application. And I was able to implement this solution at my previous job where I was developing in Oracle. I primarially used OracleCommands and OracleDataReaders to get the informaton into and out of the database. I thought this was a very nice solution. Having this many DataReaders accessing a single connection was not a problem because OracleConnections don't get locked from having more than one DataReader open at once.

At my current job, however, I use SQL Server. I am concerned that the single connection will not work in my new enviroment as the SQLDataReaders lock up the connection while they are using it. If the information that I recieved about opening connections being the real bottleneck, then I am hesitant to have a connection instanciated and opened for each method, but I am concerned that a whole lot of errors will be generated if I use the single connection method. Also, how do DataAdapters effect my decision of which approach to use.

Any advice would be most helpful. If you have any questions that would help answer just ask. Thanks.No! Definitely not the way to do it. Just use ADO.NET's connection pooling to manage it. Out of the box it's pretty efficient, but you can tweak it if necessary. There's no way you'll write anything that will be as efficient as what's already there.

You're right that a data reader hogs a connection.

And the decision is the same whether you use data adapters or readers.

Don|||How do I use ADO.Net's connection pooling? Is there an article or something that you know about that can teach me to manage this problem better.

Thanks again for your help.|||That connection pooling stuff is pretty cool. My systems class was based on Java so apparantly that type of behind the scenes work didn't take place to efficiently manage the connections. I didn't realize that when I was instanciating a connection it was already managing a pool of connections for me. slick stuff.|||So you figured out how to use it? Cool. Yeah, it definitely is an area where all of Microsoft's hard work is paying off.

Don