SQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Opening a JDBC Database Connection

Following is the syntax for registering a driver with the JDBC Driver Manager and then opening a database connection:

Class.forName(driver_name);
Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(connect_string,                                                    
                                                  username, password);

The first step in establishing JDBC connectivity is to instruct the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) class loader to load the appropriate JDBC driver.

The most common method of loading the driver into the class loader is to use the static forName method of the Class class. This method can provide applications with greater flexibility in changing database platforms by having the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) load the database driver at runtime:

Class.forName( "driver_name" );

After the database driver has been loaded, the application can establish connectivity by invoking the static getConnection method on the JDBC DriverManager class. The getConnection method takes three arguments: a connection string, username, and password:

Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(connect_string,
 username,                  password);

The connection string follows the following JDBC URL naming scheme:

jdbc:subprotocol:subname

Following are examples of how to connect to the different vendors covered in this book using JDBC.

DB2

Class.forName("COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.app.DB2Driver");
Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(
    "jdbc:db2:DATABASE", "user", "passwd" );

MySQL

Class.forName("org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver"); Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection( ...