Eric,
Performance problems can be caused by vairous means. Before you get too carried away in optimizing individual SQL queries, you may want to review the following checklist:
1. How many SQL queries are you running off your page?
2. Are you using connection pooling to avoid unneccessary DataSource instantiation?
3. Run your SQL query in a console tool (Enterprise manager for MSSQL, TOAD for Oracle, etc). Is it as slow as what you expected? If not, then the query itself may not be the bottleneck.
4. Note that (a reminder) if you modified your jsp file, the first time you reload the page it will be slower (jsp compilation required). if you want to benchmark your jsp's performance do not count the first load after modification.
5. Consider using an Object cache if the usage
pattern of your data model will benefit from it.
I had run into a performance problem before, and it's (2) and (5) that gave me a huge performance gain.
Here is a URL with lots of starting points on JDBC performance tuning.
http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/tips/jdbcconnpool.shtml