PostgreSQL: use same connection or get another from pool? - node.js

I have a Node.js script and a PostgreSQL database, and I'll be using a library that maintains a pool of connections to the database.
Say I have a script that queries the database multiple times (not a transaction) at different parts of the script, how do I tell if I should acquire a single connection/client and reuse it throughout*, or acquire a new client from the pool for each query? (Both works but which has better performance?)
*task in the pg-promise library, connect in the node-postgres library.
...
// Acquire connection from pool.
(Database query)
(Non-database-related code)
(Database query)
// Release connection to pool.
...
or
...
// Acquire connection from pool.
(Database query)
// Release connection to pool.
(Non-database-related code)
// Acquire connection from pool.
(Database query)
// Release connection to pool.
...

I am not sure, how the pool you are using works, but normally they should reuse the connections (don't disconnect after use), so you do not need to be concerned with caching connections.

You can use node-postgres module that will make you task easier.
And about your question when to use pool here is the brief answer.
PostgreSQL server can only handle 1 query at a time per connection.
That means if you have 1 global new pg.Client() connected to your
backend your entire app is bottleknecked based on how fast postgres
can respond to queries. It literally will line everything up, queuing
each query. Yeah, it's async and so that's alright...but wouldn't you
rather multiply your throughput by 10x? Use pg.connect set the
pg.defaults.poolSize to something sane (we do 25-100, not sure the
right number yet).
new pg.Client is for when you know what you're doing. When you need a
single long lived client for some reason or need to very carefully
control the life-cycle. A good example of this is when using
LISTEN/NOTIFY. The listening client needs to be around and connected
and not shared so it can properly handle NOTIFY messages. Other
example would be when opening up a 1-off client to kill some hung
stuff or in command line scripts.
here is the link of that module.
Hopefully this will help.
https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres
You can see the documentation over there and about the pooling. Thanks :)
And about closing the pool it provides the callback done which can be called when you want to close that pool.

Related

How many session will create using single pool?

I am using Knex version 0.21.15 npm. my pooling parameter is pool {min: 3 , max:300}.
Oracle is my data base server.
pool Is this pool count or session count?
If it is pool, how many sessions can create using a single pool?
If i run one non transaction query 10 time using knex connection ,how many sessions will create?
And when the created session will cleared from oracle session?
Is there any parameter available to remove the idle session from oracle.?
suggest me please if any.
WARNING: a pool.max value of 300 is far too large. You really don't want the database administrator running your Oracle server to distrust you: that can make your work life much more difficult. And such a large max pool size can bring the Oracle server to its knees.
It's a paradox: often you can get better throughput from a database application by reducing the pool size. That's because many concurrent queries can clog the database system.
The pool object here governs how many connections may be in the pool at once. Each connection is a so-called serially reusable resource. That is, when some part of your nodejs program needs to run a query or series of queries, it grabs a connection from the pool. If no connection is already available in the pool, the pooling stuff in knex opens a new one.
If the number of open connections is already at the pool.max value, the pooling stuff makes that part of your nodejs program wait until some other part of the program finishes using a connection in the pool.
When your part of the nodejs program finishes its queries, it releases the connection back to the pool to be reused when some other part of the program needs it.
This is almost absurdly complex. Why bother? Because it's expensive to open connections and much cheaper to re-use them.
Now to your questions:
pool Is this pool count or session count?
It is a pair of limits (min / max) on the count of connections (sessions) open within the pool at one time.
If it is pool, how many sessions can create using a single pool?
Up to the pool.max value.
If i run one non transaction query 10 time using knex connection ,how many sessions will create?
It depends on concurrency. If your tenth query before the first one completes, you may use ten connections from the pool. But you will most likely use fewer than that.
And when the created session will cleared from oracle session?
As mentioned, the pool keeps up to pool.max connections open. That's why 300 is too many.
Is there any parameter available to remove the idle session from oracle.?
This operation is called "evicting" connections from the pool. knex does not support this. Oracle itself may drop idle connections after a timeout. Ask your DBA about that.
In the meantime, use the knex defaults of pool: {min: 2, max: 10} unless and until you really understand pooling and the required concurrency of your application. max:300 would only be justified under very special circumstances.

nodejs oracle-db multiple DB connection

I wanted to create two database connection and periodically check the status of database connection. If database 1 fails I want to switch the connection to database 2. Can you give me some pointers please?
The first question is what exactly are you trying to do during the 'failover'. Is the Node.js app doing some work for users, or is it just the monitoring script? Then, next is how are your DBs configured (I'm guessing it's not RAC)?
There are all sorts of 'high availability' options and levels in Oracle, many of which are transparent to the application and are available when you use a connection pool. A few are described in the node-oracledb doc - look at Connections and High Availability. Other things can be configured in a tnsnames.ora file such as connection retries if connection requests fail.
As the most basic level the answer to your question is that you could periodically check whether a query works, or just use connection.ping(). If you go this 'roll your own' route, use a connection pool with size 1 for each DB. Then periodically get the connection from the pool and use it.
If you update your question with details, it would be easier to answer.

Mongoose Connection Pool

I noticed in the Mongoose docs that there is support for a connection pool.
http://mongoosejs.com/docs/connections.html
Considering that node is single threaded why is there a connection pool?
What's the lifecycle of connections in the pool?
Connection pools don't have anything to do with async vs sync -- it just works like so:
You can specify an amount of open connections to maintain to your database (let's say 10).
Each time your Node JS code makes a query, if possible, it'll use one of the already-open 10 connections to make this request -- this way you can avoid the overhead of opening a new database connection for each query.
Maintaining a connection pool is essentially maintaining an array of db connection objects, and picking unused ones for every query. It's not actually effecting threads or processes at all =)
apparently node is a single threaded but internally when node makes a call to IO operation under the hood it has some threading mechanism through which it performs IO. Main thread doesn't perform this IO operation itself, if it was performing IO, system would be dead already.
https://codeburst.io/how-node-js-single-thread-mechanism-work-understanding-event-loop-in-nodejs-230f7440b0ea

reuse mongodb connection and close it

I'm using the Node native client 1.4 in my application and I found something in the document a little bit confusing:
A Connection Pool is a cache of database connections maintained by the driver so that connections can be re-used when new connections to the database are required. To reduce the number of connection pools created by your application, we recommend calling MongoClient.connect once and reusing the database variable returned by the callback:
Several questions come in mind when reading this:
Does it mean the db object also maintains the fail over feature provided by replica set? Which I thought should be the work of MongoClient (not sure about this but the C# driver document does say MongoClient maintains replica set stuff)
If I'm reusing the db object, when should I invoke the db.close() function? I saw the db.close() in every example. But shouldn't we keep it open if we want to reuse it?
EDIT:
As it's a topic about reusing, I'd also want to know how we can share the db in different functions/objects?
As the project grows bigger, I don't want to nest all the functions/objects in one big closure, but I also don't want to pass it to all the functions/objects.
What's a more elegant way to share it among the application?
The concept of "connection pooling" for database connections has been around for some time. It really is a common sense approach as when you consider it, establishing a connection to a database every time you wish to issue a query is very costly and you don't want to be doing that with the additional overhead involved.
So the general principle is there that you have an object handle ( db reference in this case ) that essentially goes and checks for which "pooled" connection it can use, and possibly if the current "pool" is fully utilized then and create another ( or a few others ) connection up to the pool limit in order to service the request.
The MongoClient class itself is just a constructor or "factory" type class whose purpose is to establish the connections and indeed the connection pool and return a handle to the database for later usage. So it is actually the connections created here that are managed for things such as replica set fail-over or possibly choosing another router instance from the available instances and generally handling the connections.
As such, the general practice in "long lived" applications is that "handle" is either globally available or able to be retrieved from an instance manager to give access to the available connections. This avoids the need to "establish" a new connection elsewhere in your code, which has already been stated as a costly operation.
You mention the "example" code which is often present through many such driver implementation manuals often or always calling db.close. But these are just examples and not intended as long running applications, and as such those examples tend to be "cycle complete" in that they show all of the "initialization", the "usage" of various methods, and finally the "cleanup" as the application exits.
Good application or ODM type implementations will typically have a way to setup connections, share the pool and then gracefully cleanup when the application finally exits. You might write your code just like "manual page" examples for small scripts, but for a larger long running application you are probably going to implement code to "clean up" your connections as your actual application exits.

JDBC: Can I share a connection in a multithreading app, and enjoy nice transactions?

It seems like the classical way to handle transactions with JDBC is to set auto-commit to false. This creates a new transaction, and each call to commit marks the beginning the next transactions.
On multithreading app, I understand that it is common practice to open a new connection for each thread.
I am writing a RMI based multi-client server application, so that basically my server is seamlessly spawning one thread for each new connection.
To handle transactions correctly should I go and create a new connection for each of those thread ?
Isn't the cost of such an architecture prohibitive?
Yes, in general you need to create a new connection for each thread. You don't have control over how the operating system timeslices execution of threads (notwithstanding defining your own critical sections), so you could inadvertently have multiple threads trying to send data down that one pipe.
Note the same applies to any network communications. If you had two threads trying to share one socket with an HTTP connection, for instance.
Thread 1 makes a request
Thread 2 makes a request
Thread 1 reads bytes from the socket, unwittingly reading the response from thread 2's request
If you wrapped all your transactions in critical sections, and therefore lock out any other threads for an entire begin/commit cycle, then you might be able to share a database connection between threads. But I wouldn't do that even then, unless you really have innate knowledge of the JDBC protocol.
If most of your threads have infrequent need for database connections (or no need at all), you might be able to designate one thread to do your database work, and have other threads queue their requests to that one thread. That would reduce the overhead of so many connections. But you'll have to figure out how to manage connections per thread in your environment (or ask another specific question about that on StackOverflow).
update: To answer your question in the comment, most database brands don't support multiple concurrent transactions on a single connection (InterBase/Firebird is the only exception I know of).
It'd be nice to have a separate transaction object, and to be able to start and commit multiple transactions per connection. But vendors simply don't support it.
Likewise, standard vendor-independent APIs like JDBC and ODBC make the same assumption, that transaction state is merely a property of the connection object.
It's uncommon practice to open a new connection for each thread.
Usually you use a connection pool like c3po library.
If you are in an application server, or using Hibernate for example, look at the documentation and you will find how to configure the connection pool.
The same connection object can be used to create multiple statement objects and these statement objects can then used by different threads concurrently. Most modern DBs interfaced by JDBC can do that. The JDBC is thus able to make use of concurrent cursors as follows. PostgreSQL is no exception here, see for example:
http://doc.postgresintl.com/jdbc/ch10.html
This allows connection pooling where the connection are only used for a short time, namely to created the statement object and but after that returned to the pool. This short time pooling is only recommended when the JDBC connection does also parallelization of statement operations, otherwise normal connection pooling might show better results. Anyhow the thread can continue work with the statement object and close it later, but not the connection.
1. Thread 1 opens statement
3. Thread 2 opens statement
4. Thread 1 does something Thread 2 does something
5. ... ...
6. Thread 1 closes statement ...
7. Thread 2 closes statement
The above only works in auto commit mode. If transactions are needed there is still no need to tie the transaction to a thread. You can just partition the pooling along the transactions that is all and use the same approach as above. But this is only needed not because of some socket connection limitation but because the JDBC then equates the session ID with the transaction ID.
If I remember well there should be APIs and products around with a less simplistic design, where teh session ID and the transaction ID are not equated. In this APIs you could write your server with one single database connection object, even when it does
transactions. Will need to check and tell you later what this APIs and products are.

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