Hypothetically speaking, is it good practice to connect to a database for each request and close in when the request has completed?
I'm using mongodb with mgo for the database.
In my project, I would like to connect to a certain database by getting the database name from the request header (of course, this is combined with an authentication mechanism, e.g. JWT in my app). The flow goes something like:
-
User authentication:
POST to http://api.app.com/authenticate // which checks the user in a "global" database, // authenticates them and returns a signed JWT token // The token is stored in bolt.db for the authentication mechanism -
Some RESTful operations
POST to http://api.app.com/v1/blog/posts // JWT middleware for each request to /v1* is set up // `Client-Domain` in header is set to a database's name, e.g 'app-com' // so we open a connection to that database and close when // request finishes
So my questions are:
- Is this feasible? - I've read about connection pools and reusing them but I haven't read much about them yet
- Is there a better way of achieving the desired functionality?
- How do I ensure the session is only closed when the request has completed?
The reason why I need to do this is because we have multiple vendors that have the same database collections with different entries with restricted access to their own databases.
Update / Solution
I ended up using Go's built in Context by Copying a session and using it anywhere I need to do any CRUD ops
Something like:
func main() {
...
// Configure connection and set in global var
model.DBSession, err = mgo.DialWithInfo(mongoDBDialInfo)
defer model.DBSession.Close()
...
n := negroni.Classic()
n.Use(negroni.HandlerFunc(Middleware))
...
}
func Middleware(res http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request, next http.HandlerFunc) {
...
db := NewDataStore(clientDomain)
// db.Close() is an alias for ds.session.Close(), code for this function is not included in this post
// Im still experimenting with this, I need to make sure the session is only closed after a request has completed, currently it does not always do so
defer db.Close()
ctx := req.Context()
ctx = context.WithValue(ctx, auth.DataStore, db)
req = req.WithContext(ctx)
...
}
func NewDataStore(db string) *DataStore {
store := &DataStore{
db: DBSession.Copy().DB(db),
session: DBSession.Copy(),
}
return store
}
And then use it in a HandlerFunc, example /v1/system/users:
func getUsers(res http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
db := req.Context().Value(auth.DataStore).(*model.DataStore)
users := make([]SystemUser{}, 0)
// db.C() is an alias for ds.db.C(), code for this function is not included in this post
db.C("system_users").Find(nil).All(&users)
}
40% response time decrease over the original method I experimented with.
