MariaDB Java Connector, Benchmark, and Java 21 virtual threads

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 13:03:18 +0000

Why should Java and database developers care about Virtual Threads? Developers can write faster and more resource efficient applications without having to refactor synchronous code a.k.a. “imperative”) JDBC code into asynchronous (a.k.a “reactive”) code that is hard to create, debug and maintain.

Writing scalable network code is always difficult. Synchronous APIs can’t be scaled beyond a certain point because they can block when performing I/O operations, which in turn block the thread until the operation is ready. For example, if you try to read data from a socket when no data is available, the thread will freeze until data becomes available. Threads are also an expensive resource on the Java platform, so we don’t want to force them to wait for I/O operations to complete. To avoid these limitations, we typically use asynchronous or reactive I/O frameworks such as Project Reactor, RxJava, or Vert.x and connectors like R2DBC. These frameworks allow us to write code that doesn’t block a thread during an I/O operation, but instead uses a callback or event notification to notify the code when the I/O operation is complete or ready.

Diego Dupin on foojay.io - Friends of OpenJDK

MariaDB Java Connector, Benchmark, and Java 21 virtual threads