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Azure Database Support Blog
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Lesson Learned #533: Intermittent Azure SQL Database Connectivity and Authentication Issues

Jose_Manuel_Jurado's avatar
Jose_Manuel_Jurado
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Aug 01, 2025

While working on a recent service request, we helped a customer troubleshoot intermittent connection and authentication failures when accessing Azure SQL Database using Active Directory (Entra ID) authentication from a Java-based application using HikariCP with JDBC/ODBC.

While working on a recent service request, we helped a customer troubleshoot intermittent connection and authentication failures when accessing Azure SQL Database using Active Directory (Entra ID) au...
Published Aug 01, 2025
Version 1.0
Azure SQL DB
Connectivity
HirariCP
STS
BrettWoolridge's avatar
BrettWoolridge
Copper Contributor
Aug 01, 2025

Author of HikariCP here. Thanks for writing this up. I'd like to note that v7.0.0. just released and includes support for a user-specified HikariCredentialsProvider class. HikariCP will call this whenever it needs to create a new connection to allow the kind of token generation you are discussing. However, the onus is on the implementer to wisely re-use and refresh tokens. STS tokens are valid for a specific period of time, rather than being one-time-use, so the implementation should probably refresh the token on a background schedule thread and in-between simply return whatever the "current" token is. Hopefully this will be helpful to developers, but a naive implementation that always requests a new token will run into the same issues identified here. Best regards.