What is the difference between the different connection strings from JBoss 5 to Oracle 11g R2

We've a java application running inside JBoss EAP version 5.1 and until today we've always used the standard thin driver to connect to Oracle.

Upon further investigation after having upgraded all our clients to Oracle 11.2.0.2 Jdbc driver and having downloaded all the related files from Oracle site we've found three possible connections than could be used by JBoss

<connection-url>jdbc:oracle:thin:@...</connection-url> 
<driver-class>oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver</driver-class>

<connection-url>jdbc:oracle:thin:@...</connection-url> 
<driver-class>oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource</driver-class>

<connection-url>jdbc:oracle:thin:@...</connection-url> 
<driver-class>oracle.ucp.UniversalConnectionPool</driver-开发者_运维问答class>

The latest requires the copy of the UCP.JAR file in the JBoss lib directory.

Question is: does somebody experienced the different configurations and found one better than the others in terms of performance and stability?

Regards

Massimo

It depends what type of connection you want. Do you want to set up a pooled connection or not? Generally in mid-tier environments you want to use pooled connections to limit the number of connections to your database and at the same time provide good service times.

1) Direct connection to the database
2) Pooled connection to the database
3) Pooled connection to the database, uses the new UCP pool

We got some answers by RedHat.

Their suggestion was basically to continue using the first option and let JBoss manage the connection pool.

Option number 2 is not a suggested option, while option number 3 is too recent and RedHat does not have experience using it.

Regards

Massimo