Question

At the moment I am using this code to check if the database is accessible:

public bool IsDatabaseOnline(string con)
{
    bool isConnected = false;
    SQLConnection connect = null;

    try {
        connect = new SQLConnection(con);
        connect.Open();
        isConnected = true;

    } catch (Exception e) {
        isConnected = false;

    } finally {
        if (connect != null)
            connect.Close();
    }

    return isConnected;
}

While this code works fine, there is a disadvantage. If the server is not online it spends about 4 full seconds trying to open the connection before deciding that it is not available.

Is there a way to test the connection without trying to actually opening it and waiting for the timeout? Something like a database-equivalent of ping?

Answer 1

You could just change the connection timeout to be shorter. Do some testing and see how low you can go and still be reliable. I bet you could get close to 500ms.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.sqlclient.sqlconnection.connectiontimeout.aspx