OracleConnection life cycle

Question

I'm using ODP on my DB application. I created wrapper classes over ODP for my application. It's a desktop applicaton it runs in a linear way(user can not do any other operation during a running operation. GUI is locked during operations). Considering this i created a single OracleConnection object as a member and using it for all queries. But as i see best practice is using sth. like:

using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))  
{  
    SqlCommand command = connection.CreateCommand();  

    command.CommandText = "mysp_GetValue";  
    command.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;  

    connection.Open();  
    object ret = command.ExecuteScalar();  
}

in all cases(even in linear execution).

Do i have to use like this or is single OracleConnection enough?

Now i'm calling the connect of my wrapper object and it calls m_OracleConnection.open(connectionString) while application is starting. But if i create a separate connection for every query how will i hold the state of the connection? Will a boolean value like bool m_IsConnected be enough?

And how can i warn the user if connection is lost soft or hard way?

Answer 1

The important question under this is: does the ODP OracleConnection implement connection-pooling? If it does (and many ADO.NET providers do ), then the "best practice" code is absolutely fine ; it might look like you are opening a connection, but with connection pooling that Open() is actually "get an underlying connection from the pool, or connect if there isn't one available". The Dispose() (at the end of using ) releases the underlying connection back to the pool. With this approach, then, there is no need to track the state of the connection - you let the pool worry about that.

It looks like connection pooling is enabled in ODP by default, with connection-string parameters to tweak it ( source )