reuse mongodb connection and close it - node.js

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.

Related

Rust Rocket - Obtaining database connection outside of controller

Currently when using Rust Rocket framework it is necessary to get your database connection via the controller. Basically the connection is given to your handler from a pre-configured pool. Now we have to pass this connection down into any struct which needs a database connection.
If I would like to separate the concerns of reading from the data store, or potentially multiple data stores if caching is involved as well, then I will have to pass one, or potentially multiple, different connection structs from my handler into the lower layer.
While I am aware that I can encapsulate all of the connections into a single request guard, I am dissatisfied by lack of abstraction. I feel quite strongly that my handler should know nothing about the database in order to keep the concerns as separate as possible.
How would I proceed in Rust to obtain a connection from some shared pool of connections in an object, without usage of request guards and argument drilling?
Note: Terminology may be incorrect due to rather limited experience with Rocket

Azure: keeping connection in static variable to reuse it. Good strategy?

I am dealing with an Azure function that connects to a DB (Java), i suppose something quite common.
The functions may have cold or warm starts, mine should be warm for most of the time (it is called every 5 minutes). The connection is stored in a pool (JDBCPooledConnectionSource) in a static variable, so theoreticaly the connection should be reused for every warm start, gaining in efficiency.
Is it a good strategy or could cause problems? For example, a fisical connection gets broken, but its reference is still in the heap: when the reference will be used to make a query, and an exception may occur.
To avoid calls to broken connection, I could use a non static variable to store the connection. This should be safer, but less efficient because the connection should be re-created at every call.
Which strategy is the best? I suppose there are many functions that do the same (connecting to DB) so for sure somebody more experienced than me in Azure knows the best strategy or common errors.
I write the answer because I found an error about how I was using the connectionSource(). I was executing the query without releasing the connection:
ConnectionSource cs = getConnectionSource();
DatabaseConnection dbc = cs.getReadOnlyConnection("my_table");
dbc.executeStatement("Select count(*) from my_table;", JdbcDatabaseConnection.DEFAULT_RESULT_FLAGS);
and the connection was never released, so it also was not removed/reused. Now I added the following, and it works as expected:
cs.releaseConnection(dbc);

How to share database connection between different lambda functions

I went through some articles about taking advantage of lambda's container and sharing things like database connection between multiple instances, however, what if I have multiple lambda functions accessing the database and I want to have them share the same connection knowing that these functions call each other, for example, an API gateway calls the authenticator lambda function and then calls the insert user function, both of these functions make calls to the database, is it possible for them to share the same connection?
I'm using NodeJS but I can use a different language if it would support that.
You can't share connections between instances. Concurrent invocations do not use the same instance.
You can however share connections between invocations (which might be executed on the same container/instance). However, there you have to check if you connection is (still) open, in which case you can reuse it. Otherwise open a new one.
If you are worried about too many connections to your db just close the connections when you exit your lambda & instantiate new ones every time. You may also need to think about concurrency if that is a problem. A few weeks ago AWS added the possibility to control concurrency on a per function basis, which is neat.

When is blocking code acceptable in node.js?

I know that blocking code is discouraged in node.js because it is single-threaded. My question is asking whether or not blocking code is acceptable in certain circumstances.
For example, if I was running an Express webserver that requires a MongoDB connection, would it be acceptable to block the event loop until the database connection was established? This is assuming that all pages served by Express require a database query (which would fail if MongoDB was not initialized).
Another example would be an application that requires the contents of a configuration file before being initializing. Is there any benefit in using fs.readFile over fs.readFileSync in this case?
Is there a way to work around this? Is wrapping all the code in a callback or promise the best way to go? How would that be different from using blocking code in the above examples?
It is really up to you to decide what is acceptable. And you would do that by determining what the consequences of blocking would be ... on a case-by-case basis. That analysis would take into account:
how often it occurs,
how long the event loop is likely to be blocked, and
the impact that blocking in that context will have on usability1.
Obviously, there are ways to avoid blocking, but these tend to add complexity to your application. Really, you need to decide ... on a case-by-case basis ... whether that added complexity is warranted.
Bottom line: >>you<< need to decide what is acceptable based on your understanding of your application and your users.
1 - For example, in a game it would be more acceptable to block the UI while switching "levels" than during active play. Or for a general web service, "once off" blocking while a config file is loaded or a DB connection is established during webserver startup is more acceptable that if this happened on every request.
From my experience most tasks should be handled in a callback or by returning a promise. You DO NOT want to block code in a Node application. That's what makes it so nice! Mostly with MongoDB it will crash before it has a chance to connect if there is no connection. It won't' really have an effect on an API call because your server will be dead!
Source: I'm a developer at a bootcamp that teaches MEAN stack.
Your two examples are completely different. The distinction actually answers the question in and of itself.
Grabbing data from a database is dependent on being connected to that database. Any code that is dependent upon that data is then dependent upon that connection. These things have to happen serially for the app to function and be meaningful.
On the other hand, readFileSync will block ALL code, not just code that is reliant on it. You could start reading a csv file while simultaneously establishing a database connection. Once both are done, you could add that csv data to the database.

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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