ODP.NET connection pooling: How to tell if a connection has been used

Question

I\'m modifying a Winforms app to use connection pooling so data access can occur in background threads. The business logic is implemented in PL/SQL and there are a couple of

Answer 1

If what you need is to just know whether you ever had some connections not come from pool but a fresh new one, I think that you can use the HardConnectsPerSecond and SoftconnectsPerSecond performance counter provided by ODP.NET.

This won't tell you exactly which OracleConnection.Open() leads to a hard connection, though. I was also thinking about combining other ODP.NET perf counter to determine if a new hard connection is created, but after some experiments this is not easy because ODP.NET will also purge connections every three minutes (depending on the Decr Pool Size setting).