{"id":2619,"date":"2012-05-17T14:38:11","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T13:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamlor.info\/wordpress\/?p=2619"},"modified":"2021-03-11T09:19:12","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T08:19:12","slug":"async-sql-and-akka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gamlor.info\/wordpress\/2012\/05\/async-sql-and-akka\/","title":{"rendered":"Async SQL and Akka"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve already written several times about Akka and async programming with it. For example doing access files<\/a> and webservices<\/a> with it. So async API stack is complete, right? We\u2019ve got async network and web access via NIO and frameworks like Play 2.0<\/a>, Spray<\/a>, HTTPClient<\/a> etc. And with NIO 2 we easily can access the file system in asynchronous way. But wait, what about your database? What if tons of your data sits in a good old relational database? Unfortunately the current JDBC model is blocking by definition. No asynchronous operation is allowed.<\/p>\n

The standard way of doing things for async SQL operations is to use some background threads and do things there. And for many applications this is good enough. But if you do more and more db operations you start to consume more and more threads, which will be waiting for blocking operations. Wouldn\u2019t it be nicer if the database operations\u00a0are truly asynchronous like other operations?<\/p>\n

\"JDBC<\/a>

JDBC is nice, but let’s you wait<\/p><\/div>\n

So I’ve looked for an alternative to JDBC. I\u2019ve found two approaches to provide a asynchronous JDBC alternative. The async-mysql-connector<\/a> and ADBCJ<\/a>. Unfortunate both are not really actively maintained. Anyhow I decided to go ahead with ADBCJ. More about that later. Let\u2019s first take a look at how we to use everything.<\/p>\n

Async SQL in Akka<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s take a short look how to use that API in Akka. First we need to configure the database in our Akka configuration:<\/p>\n