Does "preparing" a PreparedStatement really help?

Is there a performance advantage for preparing a PreparedStatement and keeping
it around and using it thousands of times rather than making a new Statement
every time? How big?

Back when I was doing Oracle Call Interface programming in C back in the mid
to late 1980s, we were always told that pre-parsing a query was very expensive
and so you tried not to do it very often, and once you'd done it, you stored
them to reuse. As I try to switch this system over to using a connection
pool, trying to store PreparedStatements for each connection is fairly
complicated and I'm wondering if it's worth it.

--
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin(at)xcski(dot)com> http://blog.xcski.com/
I wouldn't be surprised if I'd have to put garlic in the CD drawer
to really get rid of it.
-- Arthur van der Harg on 'Gator'