MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

Review of JDBC Basics

Before examining how we can use stored programs in JDBC , let’s look at how JDBC supports database operations that don’t include stored programs. These basic operations will serve as the foundation for JDBC that does use stored programs. If you are already familiar with JDBC, you might want to skip forward to “Using Stored Programs in JDBC,” later in this chapter.

Installing the Driver and Configuring Your IDE

While the JDBC interface itself is part of native Java , to use JDBC with MySQL we will need to install a MySQL-aware JDBC driver. MySQL provides such a driver, Connector/J, which we can download from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j.html. Installation is a simple matter of unpacking the contents of a .zip file or a tar archive to a convenient location on our hard drive.

To allow our Java programs to access the Connector/J archive, we need to add the Connector/J JAR (Java Archive) file to our system’s CLASSPATH. For instance, if we unpacked the Connector/J files into a directory called C:\MySQL\ConnectorJ, then our CLASSPATH might look like this:

    Set CLASSPATH=C:\MySQL\ConnectorJ\mysql-connector-java-3.1.10-bin.jar;.

Most Java IDEs require that we specify any required libraries in either a general or a project-specific dialog box. For example, in Eclipse, we can open the Properties dialog box for the project, select Java Build Path, click Add External JARs, then add the location of the Connector/J JAR file. Figure 14-1 shows the Eclipse dialog ...