Java Hibernate with SQL Server 2012 not working?

Question

I have a Java Hibernate project configuration which worked with SQL Server 2008 R2, now with a new OS 8.1 (from 7) and SQL Server 2012 (express), I\'m unable to connect to S

Answer 1

It appears that jTDS has some issues with SQL Server 2012 (update 2?) or something has changed in 2012/8.1 which previously worked in 2008 R2/7.

Using nearly the same configuration as above with a couple minor changes, I downloaded and changed the datasource.properties to use Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server.

jdbc.driverClassName=com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
jdbc.url=jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;
#jdbc.url=jdbc:sqlserver://localhost\dbname:1433;

I just put the sqljdbc4.jar in tomcat\lib\ to verify that the MS JDBC driver 4.0 works with SQL Server 2012 with all updates and it works perfectly. The dialect org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect worked in 2012 too.

Answer 2

Your problem is jTDS does not support the way DBCP2 validates a connection by default (I'm assuming you use DBCP2 from <bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp2.BasicDataSource">). See the solution below.

Usually the error stacktrace is as shown:

Caused by: java.lang.AbstractMethodError
    at net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.JtdsConnection.isValid(JtdsConnection.java:2833)
    at org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp2.DelegatingConnection.isValid(DelegatingConnection.java:913)

The problem, though, is not related to the SQL Server version, but to the DBCP (Tomcat) version used (or the Tomcat server version the project is deployed to).

Once I was using jTDS 1.3.1 and the project worked fine (and connected to SQLServer 2012 as well) under Tomcat7. When I changed to Tomcat 8, that error appeared.

The reason, as hinted in jTDS forums, is:

• (Tomcat7 uses DBCP 1 and Tomcat 8 uses DBCP 2)
• Unlike DBCP 1.x, DBCP 2 will call java.sql.Connection.isValid(int) to validate the connection
• jTDS doesn't implement .isValid(), so jTDS driver won't work with DBCP 2, unless...
• ...unless you set the validationQuery parameter, which will make DBCP not call .isValid() to test the validity of the connection.

Workaround

So, the workaround is to set the validationQuery parameter, which will make DBCP2 not call .isValid() to test the validity of the connection. Here's how:

On Tomcat

Add validationQuery="select 1" to your Tomcat <Resource> tag for connection pool, which is usually in META-INF/context.xml of your app or conf/server.xml:

<Resource ... validationQuery="select 1" />

On Spring

When using DBCP2 through Spring, the solution is something around:

<bean id="..." ...> 
    ...
    <property name="validationQuery" value="select 1" />
</bean>

On Simple java Code

dataSource.setValidationQuery("select 1");