Keith Brown has an interesting blog post named Connection Pooling: Dogma or Holy Grail that talks about the trade-offs between delegation and connection pooling. Specifically, how important is connection pooling these days? Here's an excerpt:
What is this dogma that we all seem to believe that without connection pooling our applications will shrivel up and die? Theoretically, connection pooling was more useful in Windows NT 4 than it is in Windows 2000. Why? Because a connection implies authentication, and domain authentication on NT 4 was rather expensive for the server. During every connection the client made to the server, the server was required to “pass through” authentication back to the client's domain controller. If the client and server were in different domains, this meant the database was forced to wait for two domain controllers to respond. But Windows 2000 with Active Directory and Kerberos changed all that.
I was fortunate enough to have Keith Brown as one of the instructors that taught the Guerilla .NET class that I attended at DevelopMentor a few years ago. I'd hate to say that security is boring per se, so instead I will just say it is a topic that I have been force-feeding myself to learn more about due to its level of importance. The good news is that Keith has his security book A .NET Develooper's Guide to Windows Security content posted online that you can read for free, and it is far from boring. I've been sitting here reading it today and I have been enjoying it so much that wish I had time to read the whole thing in one sitting...but I'm going to try to work it in throughout this week instead. Check it out if you get a chance, it is outstanding!
