Hi all,

I am implementing Open Session in View pattern in a struts application and using DBCP pool for connection pooling.

My question is: Does a Hibernate Session holds the same database connection for the Session's life time or does it open and close a connection from the pool during each Transaction?

Thank you.

A Session uses a single JDBC Connection (unless you disconnect() or reconnect() it, of course).

So I suppose I need to do reconnect() and disconnect() before and after each transaction so that the db connection are returned to the pool promptly?
Or will it make sense if it's handled by Hibernate automatically each time beginTransaction() and commit()/rollback() are called?

No, it's a bit more complex (and easier at the same time) than this. There is a page on the Wiki named "Session and Transaction scope". Read that first and then the relevant parts of the Hibernate documentation. If that doesn't help you and you still don't feel comfortable with Session, Transaction, and the JDBC connections, consider reading Hibernate in Action.

There is no "easy" answer to that, unless you are happy with "it depends".

I have read that, but I will read some more the rest of the documents.

Just to be clear. In a DB intensive app, is it best practice, in terms of performance, to use Open Session in View pattern and reconnect/disconnect before and after each transaction?

Thanks again.

No, disconnect() and reconnect() is only usefull with long running Application Transactions which span several client request/response cycles.

The common pattern (without Application Transactions) is: One Session, one Transaction (which encapsulates the database transaction), one JDBC Connection, per client request. Thats a side-effect of the Open Session in View pattern.