Skipping...

> But this forces me to restart every tomcat instance, since my
> tomcats have connections to the database using jaybird, and I alway
> get "cannot read from connection" when I restart the server without
> restarting my tomcats.
> ...
> Further, what can I do to force jaybird to reconnect? [I am using
> FBWrappingDataSource.]

It was first introduced in JayBird 1.5. You can specify "ping"
statement and ping interval (it does not ping each time when
connection is returned from the pool, since I believe it's an
overhead). If you use JayBird 1.0.1, use some third-party pool that
support connection testing.

> By the way, how to handle auto-commit vs manually-commit using
> FBWrappingDataSource? Is it usually active? Can I change its setting
> for certain connections? When can I change it? What happens, when
> there are returned to the pool ?

I cannot recall how this works in 1.0.1. In 1.5 you always get
autocommit = true, tx isolation = read committed, readonly = false.
You can set them to whatever value you need and safely return back to
pool. Next time you will get "fresh" connection.

Hope this helps.

Roman