c# - ODP.NET connection pooling: How to tell if a connection has been used

Question

I'm modifying a Winforms app to use connection pooling so data access can occur in background threads. The business logic is implemented in PL/SQL and there are a couple of security related stored procedures that have to be called in order to make use of the business logic.

What I need is a way to tell if the connection has been used without a round-trip to the database. I don't think I can keep track of them in a HashSet because I doubt Equals or even ReferenceEquals could be relied upon. Any ideas?

EDIT:

Just to be clear, I plan to use ODP.NET's built-in connection pooling mechanism. If I rolled my own connection pool, keeping track of which connections were new vs. used would be extremely trivial.

Answer 1

The connection pooling provided by ODP.NET is completely opaque. That is, it isn't leaky in the way I'd like it to be - there is no way of knowing if a connection has been used before or is brand new. However it is a leaky abstraction in another way: Any session state (e.g. package scoped variables, which are session scoped) is preserved between usages of the connection. Since this is a question about determining the used vs. new state of a connection without going to the database, the answer is that it simply cannot be done using ODP.NET's built-in connection pool.

That leaves two options:

1. Create a connection pool implementation that either provides that information or performs user-defined initialisation upon creation of each new connection; or
2. Perform a round-trip to the database to determine the used vs. new state of the connection.