Question

In the projects I worked on I have classes that query/update database, like this one,

public class CompanyInfoManager
{
    public List<string> GetCompanyNames()
    {
         //Query database and return list of company names
    }
}

as I keep creating more and more classes of this sort, I realize that maybe I should make this type of class static. By doing so the obvious benefit is avoid the need to create class instances every time I need to query the database. But since for the static class, there is only one copy of the class, will this result in hundreds of requests contend for only one copy of static class?

Thanks,

Answer 1

It depends. Will you ever need to make your program multithreaded? Will you ever need to connect to more than one database? Will you ever need to store state in this class? Do you need to control the lifetime of your connections? Will you need data caching in the future? If you answer yes to any of these, a static class will make things awkward.

My personal advice would be to make it an instance as this is more OO and would give you flexibility you might need in the future.