Sybase JDBC Drivers Ignore Your Database Selection

A very common strategy in doing database-driven functional tests is for each user to have their own database instance on a shared test machine. This means that they can do whatever they want on that database instance without impacting other users, and that multiple people can run potentially destructive test cases simultaneously.

A common approach to handling that is to append the user name to the database name, and use a system property to choose the correct database instance for that test run (for example, naming your DataSource bean in your Spring context.xml something like db_${user.name}). You then have the JDBC connection declared to have the user name in the connection string (a la jdbc:foo:bar:blahblahblah/myapp_${user.name}). All works great.

Except with Sybase.

In its voyage of annoying developers who have to use their managed language drivers (the C#/ADO.Net ones are particularly noxious), Sybase have decided to screw you by ignoring this parameter when it's not valid.

The Sybase low-level protocol for this scenario largely consists of the following steps (completely simplified):

1. Connect as user Foo
2. Connection is now bound to the default database defined for user Foo
3. Issue a use correct_database statement
4. Connection is now bound to the database specified in step #3

Here's the problem: if step 3 fails because the database desired doesn't exist, Sybase will silently swallow the failure, and you'll end up in the default database for the user, and not tell you (seriously, there's no log or exception or absolutely any sign of what database you're in). Even better, the Sybase driver doesn't even store this in any field that you can introspect in the debugger, so the Sybase client library thinks it's in the database instance you want, when in fact it's not.

If you have a shared test database (with some real data in it for doing manual/gui-directed testing), and surrogate databases for each user's "blow-away-the-world" style testing, this is Very Bad Behavior Indeed.

Solution: Stop using Sybase. Seriously. Yes, it may have been en vogue 10 years ago, but it sucks.