Java Programming with Oracle JDBC

Connecting to a Database

After you’ve installed the appropriate driver, it’s time to get down to some programming and learn how to establish a database connection using JDBC. The programming involved to establish a JDBC connection is fairly simple. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Add import statements to your Java program so the compiler will know where to find the classes you’ll be using in your Java code.

2. Register your JDBC driver. This step causes the JVM to load the desired driver implementation into memory so it can fulfill your JDBC requests.

3. Formulate a database URL. That is, create a properly formatted address that points to the database to which you wish to connect.

4. Code a call to the DriverManager object’s getConnection( ) method to establish a database connection.

Package Imports

Import statements tell the Java compiler where to find the classes you reference in your code and are placed at the very beginning of your source code. To use the standard JDBC package, which allows you to select, insert, update, and delete data in SQL tables, add the following imports to your source code:

import java.sql.* ;          // for standard JDBC programs
import java.math.* ;         // for BigDecimal and BigInteger support

If you need to use JDK 1.1.x, you can still get most of Oracle’s JDBC 2.0 features by including the following import statement in your program:

import oracle.jdbc2.*        // for Oracle interfaces equivalent to
                             // JDBC 2.0 standard package for JDK 1.1.x

Keep in mind, however, that when you do start ...