Question

Hoping someone may be able to help me with a solution as to starting a background thread to monitor my database connection. Our application is deployed in weblogic 92 and I wondered if there was a way to start a thread running when the application is running ? thanks

I’m attempting to monitor my database to ensure I can switch databases should my connection fail. For this reason, I’m looking for an easy solution to run a background task.

Answer 1

Depending on what condition you want to check for and what action you want to take you can use the WebLogic Diagnostic Framework. You could have it send a JMS message when it detects a certain condition and then you can do whatever you want with an MDB.

Update your question with the condition & action you want to take and I can provide more details.

Generally speaking, starting your own threads isn’t advisable.

UPDATE:
By your description I’m guessing you don’t use JNDI or WebLogic datasources. It would be better if you used the datasources in WebLogic for connection pooling. WebLogic can detect that a connection in the pool is bad and recreate it before giving it to your application.

If you are referring to different databases then WebLogic has a multi-datasource option which has failover capability. What you should do is configure two datasources – one primary and one secondary – and then create a multi-datasource to wrap them. You then should use the JNDI of the multi-datasource in your application. Obviously if you do this you need to make sure the data is consistent between the two DB instances.

This does not make your application WebLogic-specific since it would just be a change to a JNDI name. WebLogic takes care of the rest.