This talk will give an overview of the different available Java MySQL connectors (Connector/J, MariaDB Java Connector) and connection pools (Commons-DBCP, C3P0, ...).
One of the things with the default configuration of these solutions is that they are very chatty. This can have a noticeable impact on application performance and database load. I've seen many environments where over 50% of the total amount of queries are caused by such behavior. This behavior will be explained through examples seen on production systems as well as recommendations on optimization will be made.
Load balancing and transparent failover solutions will be described for both MySQL's traditional asynchronous replication and Galera based replication (Percona XtraDB Cluster or MariaDB Galera Cluster).