Database Programming with JDBC
Interacting Directly with Your Database
By Erin Carroll and Andrew Wilson
The Java language, touted for being highly portable, was lacking a major component until recently. Database connectivity in today's Information Age must certainly be considered a major component of any programming model. To meet this requirement, JavaSoft has recently introduced the JDBC API (Application Programming Interface) for database access as flexible and portable as Java code.
The JDBC API was developed to have a standard, ODBC-like (Open Database Connectivity) interface that will allow Java-application developers access to databases residing on different servers—with different database management systems—in much the same way as ODBC. The plan was to use drivers that interpret standard JDBC syntax into native Database Management System (DBMS) syntax. From a development point of view, the underlying platform and DBMS are not very relevant, as Java is portable and uses drivers that deal with the underlying DBMS. This removes concerns about DBMS specifics from the application developer's task list.
The drivers that translate from JDBC to native DBMS must be ANSI SQL-2 entry-level compliant. JDBC also supports pass-through, where the Structured Query Language (SQL) syntax is passed directly to the database engine without translation at the driver level. As far as JDBC is concerned, this basically means anything goes; the underlying DBMS will handle the syntax.This is important, because even with a standard API, each DBMS may provide extensions that will allow for optimization of the particular engine.
