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.
Even though in many applications servers you can, you're not supposed to create your own threads in a Java EE server, see Why is spawning threads in Java EE container discouraged? for some background and workarounds.
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.
