A reader asks:

What is the best way to determine if your CF server can access the datasource defined in app properties? Basically I want to have and if then clause that continues as usual if the database is available but redirects to a site maintenance page if the db is unavailable.

Well, I'm not sure if I can say what is the best way, since it will depend on your application, but I can think of a few solutions to this. The first solution is to run a simple query in your application start up. This can be in either onApplicationStart, or wrapped in a old-style Application init setup in Application.cfm. Consider the following:

This simply returns a very small query and if anything goes wrong, a file is included and execution aborts. As I said above, you probably want to run this when the application starts up, not on every request.

There is another way to handle this that would work on every request. Simply use the cferror/onerror approach. You can check the error type, and if it is database, load a different message then you would for a normal error. One thing you want to check though - a bad SQL statement will also throw a database exception. If you check the detail, however, you will normally see a message that will tell you if it was a connection problem, or a SQL problem. The following message is what my box said when I tried to connect to SQL Server and it was shut down:

[Macromedia][SQLServer JDBC Driver]Error establishing socket. Connection refused: connect

When I used a bad SQL statement, I got:

[Macromedia][SQLServer JDBC Driver][SQLServer]Invalid object name 'tblUDFsdd'.