Connection Pool Strategy: Good, Bad or Ugly?

Question

I\'m in charge of developing and maintaining a group of Web Applications that are centered around similar data. The architecture I decided on at the time was that each applicati

Answer 1

Well, excellent question, but it's not easy to discuss using a several data bases (A) approach or the big one (B):

1. It depends on the database itself. Oracle, e.g. behaves differently from Sybase ASE regarding the LOG (and therefore the LOCK) strategy. It might be better to use several different & small data base to keep lock contention rate low, if there is a lot of parallel writes and the DB is using a pessimistic lock strategy (Sybase).
2. If the table space of the small data bases aren't spread over several disks, it might better be using one big data base for using the (buffer/cache) memory only for one. I think this is rarely the case.
3. Using (A) is scales better for a different reason than performance. You're able moving a hot spot data base on a different (newer/faster) hardware when needed without touching the other data bases. In my former company this approach was always cheaper than variant (B) (no new licenses).

I personally prefer (A) for reason 3.