Configuring a H2 Data Source in JBOSS 6

In this post I'll look at setting up a data source for JBOSS so that you can use a JNDI lookup to connect to your database from your web application. It's really easy and takes no time at all. JBOSS includes some example datasource configurations under JBOSS_HOME/docs/examples/jca that you can copy and edit for your own purposes.

I copied the hsqldb-ds.xml to my server profile under JBOSS_HOME/server/all/deploy and edited it as follows :

   
      beerDS
      jdbc:h2:tcp://localhost/~/BEER

      org.h2.jdbcx.JdbcDataSource
      sa
      

      
      5
      20

      0
      32

   

H2 is compatible with the HSQLDB drivers but they recommend using the H2 driver so thats the first thing I changed.

org.h2.jdbcx.JdbcDataSource

I then changed the connection url and specified my database, “BEER” in this case.

jdbc:h2:tcp://localhost/~/BEER

The configuration shown also sets up a connection pool which should help optimise performance.

Before you can use H2 from within your web application you need to make sure the H2*.jar is on the classpath. I copied my h2*.jar to JBOSS_HOME/common/lib.

Ensure your database is started and use the following code to get a handle to a connection you can then work with in your servlet code:

InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();
DataSource ds = (DataSource) ctx.lookup("java:/beerDS");
Connection connection = ds.getConnection();

You can then use the connection to query the database using sql or use JPA persistence and the JDNI name java:/beerDS.

These examples use my Beer database I set up in the previous post. This script will allow you to get a H2 sample database up and running. See my previous post for more details