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Should I keep the SqlConnection open?

In my Unity3D game the Player plays himself through short levels, which at the beginning take about 4 seconds. The goal is to get the best possible clear time in each level. I am currently saving these clear times locally, but I would like to upload them to an SQL Server, to be able to create a leaderboard for each level.
Since performing the SqlConnection.Open() command takes about 1-2 seconds, sometimes also 3, I was wondering whether I should keep a static connection always open, ready to execute any queries that I want to run.
Are there any unwanted and dangerous side-effects when doing it?
Edit: This is the code that I use for opening the SqlConnection.
SqlConnectionStringBuilder builder = new SqlConnectionStringBuilder()
{
DataSource = dataServer,
UserID = userId,
Password = password
};
SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(builder.ToString());
connection.Open();

First I'll answer this question:
Are there any unwanted and dangerous side-effects when doing it?
Assuming you keep this code in your Game (client) and the SQL Server is not client-side but in a server of yours located somewhere, a simple Client Reverse Engineer will be able to grab your credentials from your connection string and use them to gain Unauthorized access to your database. (NEVER trust the client)
With that being said, I would suggest you use a simple server-side technology (php,Socket App, Java servlet, etc..) along with the SQL that the client will send the information there and then to the database.
Example:
1) Client-> Posts Data -> PHP
2) PHP -> Connects -> SQL Database
3) PHP -> Inserts data -> SQL Database
Like this you can also retrieve the results of your ladder from the database by asking php (or whatever technology you are using) to send your data to the client.
Best wishes in your progress, and feel free to contact me for any additional information!

PostgreSQL Server cuts connection on Login with an ASP.NET Application

I'm currently haveing an issue with my ASP.NET Web Application. When I'm trying to login to an account, I'm getting the following Error Message (which is quite common, but I haven't found a solution yet).
An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
[...]
Unable to read data from the transport connection
[...]
The provider did not return a ProviderManifestToken string.
The Message disappears, when I reload the page, the App works fine afterwards. But when I let it alone for about 10 minutes, I see the Error again. Thats why I thought that the PostgreSQL Server is going in some kind of "sleep" mode, where it cant answer a request properly. But then I noticed it only happens, when I want to Login, every other page, where I receive Data from the Database works fine, no matter how long it was inactive. The Code snipped, where it occurs is from the default Code in the Account Controller, I didn't touch this.
var result = await this.SignInManager.PasswordSignInAsync(model.Email, model.Password, model.RememberMe, shouldLockout: false);
var user = this.db.AspNetUsers.FirstOrDefault(u => u.Email == model.Email);
Debugging step by step leads me to the Dispose Method, where it seems to dispose the SignInManager while it is still receiving data. I don't relly know, ehre to dig deeper to find the reason for this error. I also checked the connection limit for my Postgres User (there is none) and set a higher Timeout in the connection string.
pgAdmin II gibes me the following error message, when I dont interact with the database for a few Minutes, seems to be related to the Error above, so I assume its an Database related Error, not a coding Problem.

It could be several things. like broken indices. or currupt datafile or a dirfferent version of postgres between local computer and server.

Extremely slow mysql connection establishment only when called from code

I am currently trying to do something that should be simple and straight-forward - connect to a database server, run a query, see if I get anything back and if so send it back to the user. This is the code I'm using to do it:
MySqlDataReader reader = MySqlHeaper.ExecuteReader(connectionString, $"SELECT * FROM table WHERE insertDateTime > '{DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(-1800).ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss")}'";
I have also tried this with a MySqlCommand and MySqlConnection object pair, and either way the result is the same - it takes approximately 7100ms to connect to the MySql server. I know that sounds like a problem that should be on ServerFault, but my testing tells me otherwise. When I use the command line MySql client to connect to my database server using exactly the same credentials and run exactly the same query I get my connection established and my data back in nothing flat. I don't know at this stage if it's a server setting or not, but here's what I've tried so far:
Rebooting the server
Restarting the MySQL server
Setting the skip_name_resolve setting to 1 in order to prevent reverse name lookups on connect
Using alternative means of querying the server (mysql command line client and MySQL Workbench)
Opening all AWS IAM permissions on the RDS instance to allow everything from the server
Nothing seems to be making any difference, so I'm at a loss to explain this terrible performance. It's also only happening when I open the connection. Running queries, inserts, what have you is lightning fast. Any suggestions anyone might have would be most helpful.

I would not expect IAM permissions to have any impact on performance. I would expect them to be either successful or not successful.
I would execute some diagnostic protocols to get more information.
1) Try a subsequent query, to see if it is an issue with the stack being initialized. Are subsequent queries faster?
2) Try a query that is just an identity query. Something that doesn't require any sort of IO.
3) Try a query from a different platform (maybe a scripting language like ruby or php)
Once you answer those it should help you narrow it down.

This is most likely caused by Connector/NET executing a slow WMI query to query connection attributes when opening the connection; this is logged as MySQL bug 80030.
As far as I know, this isn't fixed in newer versions of the driver, but you can work around it by switching to MySqlConnector, an OSS MySQL ADO.NET library.

Access denied for user 'root'#'localhost' (using password: YES) in Visual Studio

Kindly bear with me. I am a Microsoft SQL Server person with loads of Visual Studio experience, but I need to get something done using a MySQL database.
I am trying to create a little tool here that will allow our developers to quickly update database records, and I am using Visual Studio to create a small Windows Form to do this.
In a Microsoft SQL Server connection string, I could write something like this:
Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDataBase;User Id=username;Password=password;
In a MySQL connection string, there appear to be multiple other options, but the first one looks basically the same:
Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDataBase;Uid=username;Pwd=password;
When I attempt to open the MySQL connection from my PC, I get the exception listed in the title (actually, it shows the Uid value and the IP Address of my PC instead of localhost, but I am hoping more people will recognize the error easier this way):
public static void MySQLi_Connect() {
m_err = null;
var str = Properties.Settings.Default.ConnStr;
try {
m_conn = new MySqlConnection(Properties.Settings.Default.ConnStr);
m_conn.Open();
} catch (MySqlException err) {
ErrorLog("MySQLi_Connect", err);
}
}
I did a search, and it seems that the Uid on MySQL needs to be granted access from the specific IP Address that the connection is being made from.
Further, I found this on the mysql.com doc pages:
If you do not know the IP address or host name of the machine from which you are connecting, you should put a row with '%' as the Host column value in the user table. After trying to connect from the client machine, use a SELECT USER() query to see how you really did connect. Then change the '%' in the user table row to the actual host name that shows up in the log. Otherwise, your system is left insecure because it permits connections from any host for the given user name.
A few things:
It looks like I can connect to MySQL by using a % setting in the Uid jp2code, but MySQL says I need to change that back right away to remove system vulnerability.
Microsoft SQL Server did not seem to require this - or, if it did, I simply never was slapped in the face with this vulnerability issue like MySQL is doing.
Now, I ask:
If this is going to be a tool used by different developers on different PCs, is it common practice to turn the blind eye to this horrendous system vulnerability?
Is this not really as big of a concern as MySQL is making it appear?
What is the best way to continue with a Windows Forms application that needs to connect from various locations? Obviously, I do not want to continuously be adding more entries for a particular application every time another developer wants to use the tool or someone tries to run it from a different PC.

You can configure the security of your MySQL server as strong as you like, usually you dont connect users but applications. So if you have your root user without password in production environment is your fault. Usually developers have access to development environment, so this is not a big deal.
Of course try to have as many users as roles you need, for your example I think one user is enough. In production use a secure config file for save a secure password and set you mysqlserver restricted.

I was having the same issue and I found out that the password wasn't correct.
GO to your sql command line and type the code below:
mydb in the line below is the name of the database you are working on.
passwd in the line has to match the password you have in c# code so in your case "password"
grant all privileges on mydb.* to myuser#localhost identified by 'passwd';

Like OP says you can wildcard the hostname portion. I used this on our dev-server (not recommended for production servers):
update mysql.user set host = '%' where host='localhost';
Then I had to restart the server to make MySQL use it (propably I could just have restarted the MySQL service).

SQL Server: Could not find prepared statement with handle x

Recently our QA team reported a very interesting bug in one of our applications. Our application is a C# .Net 3.5 SP1 based application interacting with a SQL Server 2005 Express Edition database.
By design the application is developed to detect database offline scenarios and if so to wait until the database is online (by retrying to connect in a timely manner) and once online, reconnect and resume functionality.
What our QA team did was, while the application is retrieving a bulk of data from the database, stop the database server, wait for a while and restart the database. Once the database restarts the application reconnects to the database without any issues but it started to continuously report the exception "Could not find prepared statement with handle x" (x is some number).
Our application is using prepared statements and it is already designed to call the Prepare() method again on all the SqlCommand objects when the application reconnects to the database. For example,
At application startup,
SqlCommand _commandA = connection.CreateCommand();
_commandA.CommandText = #"SELECT COMPANYNAME FROM TBCOMPANY WHERE ID = #ID";
_commandA.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
SqlParameter _paramA = _commandA.CreateParameter();
_paramA.ParameterName = "#ID";
_paramA.SqlDbType = SqlDbType.Int;
_paramA.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input;
_paramA.Size = 0;
_commandA.Parameters.Add(_paramA);
_commandA.Prepare();
After that we use ExceuteReader() on this _commandA with different #ID parameter values in each cycle of the application.
Once the application detects the database going offline and coming back online, upon reconnect to the database the application only executes,
_commandA.Prepare();
Two more strange things we noticed.
1. The above situation on happens with CommandType.Text type commands in the code. Our application also uses the same exact logic to invoke stored procedures but we never get this issue with stored procedures.
2. Up to now we were unable to reproduce this issue no matter how many different ways we try it in the Debug mode in Visual Studio.
Thanks in advance..

I think with almost 3 days of asking the question and close to 20 views of the question and 1 answer, I have to conclude that this is not a scenario that we can handle in the way we have tried with SQL server.
The best way to mitigate this issue in your application is to re-create the SqlCommand object instance again once the application detects that the database is online.
We did the change in our application and our QA team is happy about this modification since it provided the best (or maybe the only) fix for the issue they reported.
A final thanks to everyone who viewed and answered the question.

The server caches the query plan when you call 'command.Prepare'. The error indicates that it cannot find this cached query plan when you invoke 'Prepare' again. Try creating a new 'SqlCommand' instance and invoking the query on it. I've experienced this exception before and it fixes itself when the server refreshes the cache. I doubt there is anything that can be done programmatically on the client side, to fix this.

This is not necessarily related exactly to your problem but I'm posting this as I have spent a couple of days trying to fix the same error message in my application. We have a Java application using a C3P0 connection pool, JTDS driver, connecting to a SQL Server database.
We had disabled statement caching in our the C3P0 connection pool, but had not done this on the driver level. Adding maxStatements=0 to our connection URL stopped the driver caching statements, and fixed the error.