Prepared Statements

Under the hood, whenever you ask next.jdbc to execute some SQL it creates a java.sql.PreparedStatement, adds in the parameters you provide, and then calls .execute on it. Then it attempts to get a ResultSet from that and either return it or process it. If you asked for generated keys to be returned, that ResultSet will contain those generated keys if your database supports it, otherwise it will be whatever the .execute function produces. If no ResultSet is available at all, next.jdbc will ask for the count of updated rows and return that as if it were a result set.

Note: Some databases do not support all SQL operations via PreparedStatement, in which case you may need to create a java.sql.Statement and pass that into plan, execute!, or execute-one!, along with the SQL you wish to execute. Note that such statement execution may not have parameters. See the Prepared Statement Caveat in Getting Started for an example.

If you have a SQL operation that you intend to run multiple times on the same java.sql.Connection, it may be worth creating the prepared statement yourself and reusing it. next.jdbc/prepare accepts a connection and a vector of SQL and optional parameters and returns a java.sql.PreparedStatement which can be passed to plan, execute!, or execute-one! as the first argument. It is your responsibility to close the prepared statement after it has been used.

If you need to pass an option map to plan, execute!, or execute-one! when passing a prepared statement, you must pass nil or [] as the second argument:

(with-open [con (jdbc/get-connection ds)]
  (with-open [ps (jdbc/prepare con ["..." ...])]
    (jdbc/execute-one! ps nil {...})))

You can provide the parameters in the prepare call or you can provide them via a call to set-parameters (discussed in more detail below).

;; assuming require next.jdbc.prepare :as p
(with-open [con (jdbc/get-connection ds)
            ps  (jdbc/prepare con ["..."])]
  (jdbc/execute-one! (p/set-parameters ps [...])))

Prepared Statement Parameters

If parameters are provided in the vector along with the SQL statement, in the call to prepare, then set-parameter is behind the scenes called for each of them. This is part of the SettableParameter protocol:

• (set-parameter v ps i) -- by default this calls (.setObject ps i v) (for nil and Object)

This can be extended to any Clojure data type, to provide a customized way to add specific types of values as parameters to any PreparedStatement. For example, to have all java.time.Instant, java.time.LocalDate and java.time.LocalDateTime objects converted to java.sql.Timestamp automatically:

(extend-protocol p/SettableParameter
  java.time.Instant
  (set-parameter [^java.time.Instant v ^PreparedStatement ps ^long i]
    (.setTimestamp ps i (java.sql.Timestamp/from v)))
  java.time.LocalDate
  (set-parameter [^java.time.LocalDate v ^PreparedStatement ps ^long i]
    (.setTimestamp ps i (java.sql.Timestamp/valueOf (.atStartOfDay v))))
  java.time.LocalDateTime
  (set-parameter [^java.time.LocalDateTime v ^PreparedStatement ps ^long i]
    (.setTimestamp ps i (java.sql.Timestamp/valueOf v))))

Note that you can extend this protocol via metadata so you can do it on a per-object basis if you need:

(with-meta obj {'next.jdbc.prepare/set-parameter (fn [v ps i]...)})

The converse, converting database-specific types to Clojure values is handled by the ReadableColumn protocol, discussed in the previous section (Result Set Builders).

As noted above, next.jdbc.prepare/set-parameters is available for you to call on any existing PreparedStatement to set or update the parameters that will be used when the statement is executed:

• (set-parameters ps params) -- loops over a sequence of parameter values and calls set-parameter for each one, as above.

If you need more specialized parameter handling than the protocol can provide, then you can create prepared statements explicitly, instead of letting next.jdbc do it for you, and then calling your own variant of set-parameters to install those parameters.

Batched Parameters

By default, next.jdbc assumes that you are providing a single set of parameter values and then executing the prepared statement. If you want to run a single prepared statement with multiple groups of parameters, you might want to take advantage of the increased performance that may come from using JDBC's batching machinery.

You could do this manually:

;; assuming require next.jdbc.prepare :as p
(with-open [con (jdbc/get-connection ds)
            ps  (jdbc/prepare con ["insert into status (id,name) values (?,?)"])]
  (p/set-parameters ps [1 "Approved"])
  (.addBatch ps)
  (p/set-parameters ps [2 "Rejected"])
  (.addBatch ps)
  (p/set-parameters ps [3 "New"])
  (.addBatch ps)
  (.executeBatch ps)) ; returns int[]

Here we set parameters and add them in batches to the prepared statement, then we execute the prepared statement in batch mode. You could also do the above like this, assuming you have those groups of parameters in a sequence:

(with-open [con (jdbc/get-connection ds)
            ps  (jdbc/prepare con ["insert into status (id,name) values (?,?)"])]
  (run! #(.addBatch (p/set-parameters ps %))
        [[1 "Approved"] [2 "Rejected"] [3 "New"]])
  (.executeBatch ps)) ; returns int[]

Both of those are somewhat ugly and contain a fair bit of boilerplate and Java interop, so a helper function is provided in next.jdbc.prepare to automate the execution of batched parameters:

(with-open [con (jdbc/get-connection ds)
            ps  (jdbc/prepare con ["insert into status (id,name) values (?,?)"])]
  (p/execute-batch! ps [[1 "Approved"] [2 "Rejected"] [3 "New"]]))

By default, this adds all the parameter groups and executes one batched command. It returns a (Clojure) vector of update counts (rather than int[]). If you provide an options hash map, you can specify a :batch-size and the parameter groups will be partitioned and executed as multiple batched commands. This is intended to allow very large sequences of parameter groups to be executed without running into limitations that may apply to a single batched command. If you expect the update counts to be very large (more than Integer/MAX_VALUE), you can specify :large true so that .executeLargeBatch is called instead of .executeBatch. Note: not all databases support .executeLargeBatch.

Caveats

There are several caveats around using batched parameters. Some JDBC drivers need a "hint" in order to perform the batch operation as a single command for the database. In particular, PostgreSQL requires the :reWriteBatchedInserts true option and MySQL requires :rewriteBatchedStatement true (both non-standard JDBC options, of course!). These should be provided as part of the db-spec hash map when the datasource is created.

In addition, if the batch operation fails for a group of parameters, it is database-specific whether the remaining groups of parameters are used, i.e., whether the operation is performed for any further groups of parameters after the one that failed. The result of calling execute-batch! is a vector of integers. Each element of the vector is the number of rows affected by the operation for each group of parameters. execute-batch! may throw a BatchUpdateException and calling .getUpdateCounts (or .getLargeUpdateCounts) on the exception may return an array containing a mix of update counts and error values (a Java int[] or long[]). Some databases don't always return an update count but instead a value indicating the number of rows is not known (but sometimes you can still get the update counts).

Finally, some database drivers don't do batched operations at all -- they accept .executeBatch but they run the operation as separate commands for the database rather than a single batched command.

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