The OpenEdge Hive

Bruce Gruenbaum:
The Connection Factory establishes and maintains connections to external targets - databases, AppServers and other TCP/IP targets. It really is responsible for all connectivity to anything that is not in the same process. It handles connection pooling and connection failure. It also abstracts connections into logical connections so that the physical service being requested can be treated separately from the logical connection. This means that a single database connection could be used for multiple logical databases and the same is true for AppServers and any other target.

Thomas Mercer-Hursh
It seems to me that there are a couple of issues here. One of them relates to your environment service, e.g., the environment tells me that I should be able to connect to the billing database so the connection factory can be expected to make that connection as long as the security service agrees that I am personally authorized.

Another relates to the question of local versus centralized sources of information. E.g., if asked to make a connection to a billing database, where does the information come from about where that database resides and what parameters are needed to connect to it?

I am also curious about the technical aspect of the database connection since ABL doesn't have the sort of connection object which is is some 3GLs. With a connection object, one instantiates it and makes it available to whatever needs it and one passes in SQL queries for it to process and has a generic method for handling a result set. Possibly we have the tools to do this in ABL now ... or possibly not ... but is it really something we would want to do? And, if not, then how is the connection made available to the session unless it is established in a top level procedure and then everything is run below that? Also, in the absence of a connection object, how does on centralize things like knowing that a connection has been lost and possibly re-establishing itself?

Initial content adapted from a thread on the PEG