Connection exceptions

Hi

Anybody got any best practices for how do I deal with connection problems
in JDBC?

I am working on a storage tier where the DAOs can encounter faulty
database connections, either closed or other-wise non functional
connections.
The database connection is pooled with Commons DBCP, and my initial
thought was to reinitialise or restart the pool, if there were any
problems.
But then I realised that the pool can test connections before giving it to
the application, so now moving into muddy waters because I dont know much
about these details.

My original code is something like:

  while (retry > 0) {
    Connection con = ds.getConnection
    if (con==null) {
        dsFactory.restartDS();
        retry--:
        continue;
    }
    try {
       dao.execute();
    } catch (SQLExceptions e) {

    con.close();
  }

Not knowing the details of how the DBCP or the DataSource works in these
situations, make this code prone to problems.

I will continue to investigate, but any feedback about what to look at is
appreciated.

regards

thomas