Java™ Oracle® Database Development

Using Oracle Object-Relational Features with JDBC

So far, we've seen in this chapter and in the previous one how we can use Java with relational data. We've recommended putting JDBC and SQL functionality in their own classes as a separate layer to isolate the rest of the application from the details of how data is stored. But the rest of the application still has to deal with the fact that the data is not represented as objects.

We've also seen that Oracle will allow us to define our own object types. If we're using objects in Oracle, it's easy to “flatten” them to look like standard relational objects by using the appropriate SQL queries, but this is really defeating the purpose of Oracle's object-relational features—though there may be situations ...