Hi Paul.

After giving this some more thought, I must agree with you. For one thing, persistent connections do require more resources with the only benefit of being a little faster. They also tie up a connection handle during the duration of the session, so the server might run out of connection handles during heavy loads. Having a connection open only for as long as it takes to submit the data is definitely the way to go for a web app. Also, I'm not sure there is a SQL 92 compliant command that would return the connection handle anyway. It seem like this would be fundamental, since if the connection exists, a proper authentication has occurred, so it seem like there would be some standard SQL command that would return the connection handle. When using the microsoft OLE DB provider, there is a sqlgetconnectattr command that could be used, but I'm not sure ASP can use OLE DB. I didn't really find a solution with which I'm totally confortable. The session variable route has both pros and cons and seem to be better suited to a Microsoft setting using IIS, asp or asp.net, which mean the app might not port satisfactorily to a client running a Unix/Linux web server; although, the apache web serve does now support asp.

LelandJ