Improve server startup using Informix and MyBatis

Working on a project with an Informix database and using MyBatis as the persistence layer, I noted that the start-up of the server takes a long time (about 2 minutes). It is not really a problem if the performance of the application are good, as you don’t start your server all the day, but when you are in the implementation phase…
After step-by-step execution, I discovered that MyBatis gathers the metadata of the database to adapt its behavior, but this part was responsible of the delay (maybe Informix specific?).
I decided to replace this step, fortunately, using MyBatis with Spring, it’s not really a big deal 🙂
As the main purpose of this step is to identify the database provider, I defined a class which returns always the same information: Informix database.

1. first, you need to define a new DatabaseIdProvider:

   public class IfxDatabaseIdProvider 
           implements org.apache.ibatis.mapping.DatabaseIdProvider {
     
     private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(IfxDatabaseIdProvider.class);
   
     private Properties properties;
     
     public String getDatabaseId(DataSource dataSource) {
       
       return "Informix Dynamic Server";
     }
   
     public void setProperties(Properties p) {
       this.properties = p;
     }
   
     public Properties getProperties() {
       return properties;
     }
   }
   

2. now, you need to tell to MyBatis to use the new class, your Spring config file looks like:

       <bean id="ifxDatabaseIdProvider" 
           class="myPackage.IfxDatabaseIdProvider"/>
       
       <bean id="sqlSessionFactory" 
           class="org.mybatis.spring.SqlSessionFactoryBean">
         <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
         <property name="mapperLocations" value="classpath:mapper/*Mapper.xml"/>
         <property name="databaseIdProvider" ref="ifxDatabaseIdProvider"/>
       </bean>
   

Done!