Question

I’m making a stateless web service which uses Microsoft SQL Server to read data (and only to read), without using transactions. What will be the best of the following:

1. Starting SqlConnection at each call to the web service, or
2. Storing SqlConnection in a static field.

IMHO, the first approach will cost too much resources (if ten clients make ten requests to the web service, it opens one hundred times the database…), but the second one has maybe some problems? Maybe race condition? Or security issues?

Answer 1

Adding a max/min pool size allows SQL server to pool connections so even though you create a new SqlConnection object, the db can pool connections for you.

(MSDN, min pool size)

eg. ConnectionString=”Catalog=MyDb; MinPoolSize=10; MaxPoolSize=10…”