Posted on

Debugging Heavy Load on Oracle Databases

A lot of enterprises rely on the Oracle database for their data layer. Although the licenses are costly, Oracle provides a proven product in terms of performance and scalability and very good support, so many people find it to be a good trade-off. However, every product will have certain limits. If Oracle is being used to serve data by busy applications, the number of parallel database connections will often cause bottlenecks. This can lead to high CPU usage on the Oracle side. It can also starve other applications from getting connections, leading to functional issues. So it becomes critical for developers to understand not just the number of connections their applications are consuming but also how effectively they are being used.

Before we dive in, there is one prerequisite for the below analysis to work. We need to ensure that an appropriate value is set for the module attribute. One of the ways to do it is during the connection creation. The application can set the initSql attribute to call dbms_application_info.set_module('<module-name>','<action-name>') . This will help us map the database connection to a certain application while looking at the oracle database.

Posted on

Database Drivers: Chauffeuring Your Data to Where it Needs to Go

Most, if not all, companies deal with complications and integration headaches somewhere in their data pipeline due to an inability or difficulty of connecting certain systems. Sometimes you have to add yet another technology to the lineup just to connect different systems and get your data to where it needs to go. However, in this modern-day, less is more. Most technologies that emerge are all about being more efficient and providing more functionality in a smaller package. If you can meet your data management needs with fewer tools, then it’s a win-win for cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and ease of use. Enter database drivers.

The Magical Adaptors

To put it plainly, each computer system needs some sort of adaptor or tool to be able to connect to other computer systems that are not the same. You can think about this in the physical or interior (computer system) sense. For a physical example, we all know the major frustration that comes along with upgrading your phone, when your chargers and headphones no longer fit in the ever-shrinking port on the bottom of the phone. However, you can buy an adapter to serve as a “middle man” to enable the connection. With computer systems, it’s the same but different. A database driver works like that physical phone adaptor, but instead of having to invest in an additional product to add to the tech stack, you can develop an adaptor/connector to extend the database functionality. Like an extension to a software package.

Posted on

Detecting and Resolving Database Connection Leaks with Java Applications

While working on customer's production setup we got an opportunity to analyze his code and configuration. Problem customer faced was that during high traffic, application become unresponsive and it doesn't accept any further request. Only workaround was to restart the application. The pplication was deployed on Red Hat Fuse 6.3.0.

DB Team analyzed that there were too many connections created on Database which was impacting Database too. After going through code and configuration we found that the application code was not implemented with any database connection pool.

Posted on

PostgreSQL Connection Pooling: Part 1 – Pros and Cons

PostgreSQL Connection Pooling

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, ‘threads’ were a programming novelty rarely used and seldom trusted. In that environment, the first PostgreSQL developers decided forking a process for each connection to the database is the safest choice. It would be a shame if your database crashed, after all.

You may also like:  PostgreSQL Connection Pooling With PgBouncer

Since then, a lot of water has flown under that bridge, but the PostgreSQL community has stuck by their original decision. It is difficult to fault their argument, as it’s absolutely true that: