connection pooling - Efficient SQL test query or validation query that will work across all (or most) databases

Question

Many database connection pooling libraries provide the ability to test their SQL connections for idleness. For example, the JDBC pooling library c3p0 has a property called preferredTestQuery, which gets executed on the connection at configured intervals. Similarly, Apache Commons DBCP has validationQuery.

Many example queries I've seen are for MySQL and recommend using SELECT 1; as the value for the test query. However, this query doesn't work on some databases (e.g. HSQLDB, for which SELECT 1 expects a FROM clause).

Is there a database-agnostic query that's equivalently efficient but will work for all SQL databases?

Edit:

If there's not (which seems to be the case), can somebody suggest a set of SQL queries that will work for various database providers? My intention would be to programmatically determine a statement I can use based on my database provider configuration.

Answer 1

After a little bit of research along with help from some of the answers here:

SELECT 1

• H2
• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server (according to NimChimpsky)
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite
• Hive

---

SELECT 1 FROM DUAL

• Oracle

---

SELECT 1 FROM any_existing_table WHERE 1=0

or

SELECT 1 FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SYSTEM_USERS

or

CALL NOW()

• HSQLDB (tested with version 1.8.0.10)

  Note: I tried using a WHERE 1=0 clause on the second query, but it didn't work as a value for Apache Commons DBCP's validationQuery, since the query doesn't return any rows

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VALUES 1 or SELECT 1 FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1

• Apache Derby (via daiscog)

SELECT 1 FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1

• DB2

select count(*) from systables

• Informix