Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

Hi

I am running Tomcat 4.1.18, Oracle 8.1.7 using the thin driver, and Commons DBCP.

My problem mainly stems from the fact that my company has a policy to reboot the database server every night. I know, I know, Oracle on Sun should run forever.

Anyway, I can't get around the policy. Perhaps someone here can help me get around it.

Since the DB gets restarted, the connections that the pool has open become invalid. My application gets a SQLException: IoException: Broken Pipe error when ever I try access the JSP page in the morning. It is configured with two connections and the page will error out twice before finally rendering.

I'm in the process of adding a validation query to my pool, but I am not sure that this will help. See link for details
http://www.mail-archive.com/tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org/msg88755.html

I'm not real happy about this validation query because it is just more network traffic. I don't have a lot of documentation on the DBCP pool. Is there something else I can do?

Thanks

Michael