Database Access 

Managing Connections

Portal applications that have to access databases directly should not try to create connections themselves. Portal application must use the built-in connection pools in order to limit the number of concurrent connections and to prevent possible low resources that would affect other applications.

The SAP Connector Framework comes with a JDBC adapter that can be used to manage databases like regular J2EE resources under control of the application server. This will positively affect the server performance and stability.

A good approach would be to extract the database logic from the portal application and put it to a Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) or at least a portal service, using portal applications only as front-end components. EJBs offer a superior infrastructure to wrap backend systems. The separation of front-end and business logic is the best solution to increase performance and reduce maintenance. Also business logic wrapped in an EJB is easier to reuse by other application and can easily be published as Web Service.