Just wondered if I could get a few opinions on the following.

We have just had a new developer start here and he uses a method to connect/disconnect to a database I've never seen before. Basically he sets the database connection as a global object for the page and then opens it in Page_Load and closes it in Page_Unload. As I've not seen this method before I'm presuming it is not best practice.

Obviously this means he only opens one connection and I know that there is a high overhead when opening and closing database connections. However I'm not sure how this would cope with errors.

Is it better to open and close database connections when needed and be able to use using and try/catch statements?

Your thoughts appreciated.

DJ