Configuring Hibernate with HikariCP

Question

Because of problems with c3p0 connection pool, I want to see the alternatives and decide which one might be more usable in my case. HikariCP looks very promising, but there is no documentation how to use it with Hibernate.

So far I am using c3p0 as follows:

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="persistenceUnit"/>
    <property name="jpaProperties">
        <props>
            <prop key="hibernate.dialect">${database.dialect}</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">${database.structure}</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.url">${database.connection}</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.username">${database.username}</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.password">${database.password}</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.driver_class">${database.driver}</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.shutdown">true</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.writedelay">0</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding">UTF-8</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.charSet">UTF-8</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.show_sql">${database.show_sql}</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.format_sql">false</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.ejb.metamodel.generation">disabled</prop>
            <!-- Use the C3P0 connection pool provider -->
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.provider_class">org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.c3p0.min_size">5</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.c3p0.max_size">30</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.c3p0.timeout">300</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.c3p0.max_statements">50</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.c3p0.idle_test_period">600</prop>
        </props>
    </property>

Can someone point me how to configure HikariCP in such way?

Answer 1

HikariCP, as of version 1.2.6, now supports Hibernate 4.x explicitly with a ConnectionProvider. See the new wiki documentation for details.

Answer 2

You can use the org.hibernate.hikaricp.internal.HikariCPConnectionProvider which is shipped by hibernate-hikaricp package.

You can install it as Maven dependency (please don't forget to update the version number):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-hikaricp</artifactId>
    <version>5.2.10.Final</version>
</dependency>

And configure it in hibernate.properties:

`hibernate.connection.provider_class=org.hibernate.hikaricp.internal.HikariCPConnectionProvider`

Please note: As of Hibernate 4.3.6 you should no longer use com.zaxxer.hikari.hibernate.HikariConnectionProvider (see: https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/wiki/Hibernate4)

Answer 3

UPDATE: See uwolfer's answer below, it is now the official way to use HikariCP with Hibernate.

I'm one of the authors of HikariCP. I don't claim to be a Spring guy, and I weened off of Hibernate a few years back, but this link might be helpful:

http://www.luckyryan.com/2013/02/20/spring-mvc-with-basic-persistence-spring-data-jpa-hibernate/

In the XML configuration section on that page, where their example uses BoneCP as the mainDataSource, simply try replacing that section with configuration for HikariCP instead.

In your example above, you appear to be configuring Hibernate through Spring and defining the DataSource inside of the Hibernate config, which is fine. But an alternative (presented on that page) is to configure the DataSource separately through Spring and then directing Hibernate to use it.

Regarding statement caching, HikariCP does not do it because we believe that is best left to the vendors' JDBC driver/DataSource. Almost every major DB vendors' JDBC DataSource provides statement caching, and it can be configured through HikariCP by specifying DataSource properties. Refer to the HikariCP github page for how to set properties on the underlying (vendor) DataSource.