We Keep Coding

How to check if you're still connected to the database with jpa

I'm trying to check the database connection with jpa using the EntitityManager/Session class.
To check both cases (connected/not connected), I simply start/deactivate the service mysql before running the code.
Asking simple sql queries to the database is out of mind since it doesn't cover all cases.
I already tried:
Session session = entityManager.unwrap(Session.class)
session.isConnected();
But that always returns true...
When I disable the mySQL service I want session.isConnected() to return false, but it always returns true;
Is there any other way to check for the database connection(using any other classes maybe)?

Short answer: don't
Long answer: if you're developing an application where this is important, you will probably be using some sort of database connection pooling framework, like the
Tomcat JDBC pool
Apache Commons DBCP
HikariCP
C3P0 Connection pool
This will manage many important aspects for you, including connection lifecycle. In tomcat jdbc for example you can specify:
testOnBorrow="true"
validationQuery="select 1 from sysibm.dual"
This on an IBM DB2 database will test whether a connection went stale every time you use it, and also swap it out for a fresh one if the select fails. Done this way, you will never have to worry about this on the level of you application code.

Configure c3p0 to close Hibernate session when connection is down

I am using Hibernate with c3p0 for connection pooling. Since I am working in a multisharded database environment and the possibility of shards' downtime is a realistic use case scenario (by means external to the application at hand, e.g. someone just taking the shard down for whatever reason), I am trying to have c3p0 explicitly close the Hibernate session once it detects that the database connection is down so that I can skip the particular shard's session in my multi-shard scan.
Is there a way to configure c3p0 to notify Hibernate, by invoking Session.close() once it finds out that the connection is down so that calling Session.isOpen() can return a meaningful boolean?
RELATED: Preemptively and gracefully check that org.hibernate.Session is still connected (via c3p0)

the short answer is no, c3p0 won't help you here.
it sounds like (looking here and at your previous question) you are doing something that works at cross-purposes to c3p0, that is you are holding long-lived Sessions rather than creating Sessions on an as-needed basis and then destroying them promptly. that kind of thing is very fragile. it is the architecture Connection pools exist to avoid.
your best choice, IMO, would be "don't do that". don't ever cache Sessions at all. then ordinary Connection testing (perhaps with checkoutTimeout set too) will resolve the problem. if a shard is down, attempts to acquire a Connection will fail, and you can skip the shard if that's the best workaround.
c3p0 knows nothing whatsoever about hibernate. c3p0's author is grateful to hibernate for popularizing his (my) library, but c3p0 has no idea what a Session is, just a Connection. the only way that c3p0 could help you a little bit, in theory, would be that it could report to you an event when it notices that a database is down (which might be quite promptly or quite slowly depending on your configuration). you could respond to the event by close()ing sessions.
unfortunately, c3p0 doesn't (yet) offer hooks through which users could respond to acquisition failures. it might — that's a feature i'm thinking about adding for 0.9.6. but it doesn't now. however, it would be pretty trivial to implement something that polls your shards and closes their Sessions yourself. all c3p0 would do to notice outages would be to call DriverManager.getConnection( ... ) or dataSource.getConnection()and observe Exceptions. you can do that yourself!
i still strongly recommend the first solution, though. get rid of the long-lived Session objects.

Transaction Management in EJB

Recently I was asked a question which left me thinking..want to get the community views on the same question.
I have a CustomerEJB which has say a createCustomer method. My EJB is exposed as a web service and hence createCustomer is one of its operations.
When a request hits createCustomer, 2 operations need to be performed
An INSERT SQL query into the database which may be adding certain data into db that came in input request
creation of a text file, say .txt in the file system.
Now the question is I want to couple these two tasks into a transaction. If any one task fails, I rollback the other task as well.
Without mentioning any hot technologies, like Spring/Hibernate what is the approach I can follow for Transaction management
My thoughts:
1. I can use JTA, demarcate the transaction boundaries and perform commit and rollback accordingly. JDBC can be used for the SQL task
2. I can use DAOs
Inviting your kind suggestions/comments

You would need to wrap the file creating in a XA capable JCA connector (not sure whether there's a ready made one out there, a quick good only found this fsconnector which doesn't support transactions yet), and use an XA driver for your DB transaction (most DBs will will be able handle this) and then wrap your EJB in an XA transaction (should be straightforward).
As long as both resources can handle the XA transactions, you'll get the benefit of 2-phase commits, which is what you're after.

How to generically test a database connection with hibernate

I have a service method on an api that can be called to check the health of my database connection.
The method is pulling the query string from a properties file (depends on DB vendor, using Sybase and HSQL for now, more in future), and executing it. Then the method lets the caller know if it succeeded or failed.
In addition to this, I was using the Query.setHint("javax.persistence.query.timeout") to set a timeout on the query:
javax.persistence.EntityManager entityManager;
...
Query heartbeatQuery = entityManager.createNativeQuery(heartbeatQueryString);
heartbeatQuery.setHint("javax.persistence.query.timeout", heartbeatTimeout);
heartbeatQuery.getResultList();
My problem is the timeout property is working against my Sybase DB, but not against my HSQL DB. It sounds like it depends on the vendor, so I don't know for sure when it will work.
Is there a better way to generically test the DB connection & include some kind of timeout parameter?

Well sadly no. JPA's query hints are not mandatory, i.e. it's up to the implementator (EclipseLink, Hibernate, etc) to enforce them or not. Moreover, even if the implementator does chose to recognize a certain query hint, if that hint's functionality is not supported by the database then it won't work (here some implementators are nice and tell you if a certain hint won't work agains the current db while others fail silently). In the case of HSQLDB there's no way to set the query timeout. You can only set a timeout for the login (i.e. how long should it wait for a successful login before failing), but not for the queries duration.
Things are not so grim however. On the one hand, even if you'd solve this, you'd still stumble over other issues with HSQLDB, as it does not support a lot of other nice functionalities that most dbs have. You should only use HSQLDB for basic integration/unit testing. For more involved testing, you can use the integrated MySQL Java library. You can find it here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-mxj.html
This is simply a packaged fully working Mysql server, which has a Java api for star and stop, works on most major OSs (win,lin, os x, etc). This way you can have your integration tests start a real Mysql server, and try your code there, where such stuff as a query timeout hint will work fine.

What is the 'best' way to do distributed transactions across multiple databases using Spring and Hibernate

I have an application - more like a utility - that sits in a corner and updates two different databases periodically.
It is a little standalone app that has been built with a Spring Application Context. The context has two Hibernate Session Factories configured in it, in turn using Commons DBCP data sources configured in Spring.
Currently there is no transaction management, but I would like to add some. The update to one database depends on a successful update to the other.
The app does not sit in a Java EE container - it is bootstrapped by a static launcher class called from a shell script. The launcher class instantiates the Application Context and then invokes a method on one of its beans.
What is the 'best' way to put transactionality around the database updates?
I will leave the definition of 'best' to you, but I think it should be some function of 'easy to set up', 'easy to configure', 'inexpensive', and 'easy to package and redistribute'. Naturally FOSS would be good.

The best way to distribute transactions over more than one database is: Don't.
Some people will point you to XA but XA (or Two Phase Commit) is a lie (or marketese).
Imagine: After the first phase have told the XA manager that it can send the final commit, the network connection to one of the databases fails. Now what? Timeout? That would leave the other database corrupt. Rollback? Two problems: You can't roll back a commit and how do you know what happened to the second database? Maybe the network connection failed after it successfully committed the data and only the "success" message was lost?
The best way is to copy the data in a single place. Use a scheme which allows you to abort the copy and continue it at any time (for example, ignore data which you already have or order the select by ID and request only records > MAX(ID) of your copy). Protect this with a transaction. This is not a problem since you're only reading data from the source, so when the transaction fails for any reason, you can ignore the source database. Therefore, this is a plain old single source transaction.
After you have copied the data, process it locally.

Setup a transaction manager in your context. Spring docs have examples, and it is very simple. Then when you want to execute a transaction:
try {
TransactionTemplate tt = new TransactionTemplate(txManager);
tt.execute(new TransactionCallbackWithoutResult(){
protected void doInTransactionWithoutResult(
TransactionStatus status) {
updateDb1();
updateDb2();
}
} catch (TransactionException ex) {
// handle
}
For more examples, and information perhaps look at this:
XA transactions using Spring

When you say "two different databases", do you mean different database servers, or two different schemas within the same DB server?
If the former, then if you want full transactionality, then you need the XA transaction API, which provides full two-phase commit. But more importantly, you also need a transaction coordinator/monitor which manages transaction propagation between the different database systems. This is part of JavaEE spec, and a pretty rarefied part of it at that. The TX coordinator itself is a complex piece of software. Your application software (via Spring, if you so wish) talks to the coordinator.
If, however, you just mean two databases within the same DB server, then vanilla JDBC transactions should work just fine, just perform your operations against both databases within a single transaction.

In this case you would need a Transaction Monitor (server supporting XA protocol) and make sure your databases supports XA also. Most (all?) J2EE servers comes with Transaction Monitor built in. If your code is running not in J2EE server then there are bunch of standalone alternatives - Atomicos, Bitronix, etc.

You could try Spring ChainedTransactionManager - http://docs.spring.io/spring-data/commons/docs/1.6.2.RELEASE/api/org/springframework/data/transaction/ChainedTransactionManager.html that supports distributed db transaction. This could be a better alternative to XA