I need to ping a database to check if it's up or not. Is there a more efficient way of doing this than sending off a random query and catching exceptions?

You realize that this is a Hibernate forum right ?

You mean reconnect ?

Thats addressed in the connection pool you use.
With hibernat usually c3p0.
Here is some info:

http://www.mchange.com/projects/c3p0/index.html
see chapter „Configuring Connection Testing“ and Appendix D

and
http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.ph ... =reconnect