In the ongoing rush toward services, some traditional types of connectivity can get overlooked. Take for example data base drivers. They can be important elements in a enterprise architecture, as many developers have learned when they have taken them for granted, and consequently incurred performance penalties, or worse.
At some point, the driver may be the only route between a service and needed data.
"Many services still need to talk to primary data. In effect, software architects have to think all down the layers," said Jonathan Bruce, long-time JDBC hand and now program manager for .NET technologies at DataDirect Technologies.
The architect, in effect, said Bruce, has to think through all the layers of the 'onion' right down to the data, in order to have a well-behaved system. That's still true in the services era.
"It is even more critical than before. There is a body of work that has to occur to expose your resources in a services context," he said. "You marshall, you wire, you govern - it all requires additional CPU cycles, so that you have less room than ever for nonperformant data providers."
JDBC is fairly well understood, and JDBC updates do not come along everyday. But there has been an upgrade to JDBC 4.0 in the Java DB driver camp. It takes a while for new features to wend through standards, through the DB vendor community and so on.
Notable new elements in JDBC include:
- More APIs for access to common features of SQL:2003.
- Features to handle exceptions, including chained exceptions.
- A SQLXML mapping in the Java programming language for the XML data type in SQL.
- Better BLOB support.
- A new Wrapper interface pattern that helps in accessing an instance of a resource that may have been wrapped for architectural reasons.
[Source: What's New in JDBC 4.0? by Sharad Acharya today.java.net]
Bruce says elements in the rev bear watching. Data Direct, which took part in the deliberations moving up to 4.0, is now JDBC compliant with its DataDirect Connect for JDBC version 4.0, released in September. New DataDirect Connect elements include support for enterprise runtime features of JDBC 4.0 including extended diagnostics and caching enhancements. Also supported, of course, are the SQLXML data type, the wrapper pattern, as well as multiple JVMs. Now, the company's drivers are packaged as a single JAR file that can be used across all Java platforms, said Bruce.
JDBC info resources
Data Direct JDBC - blog
On JDBC -JDBC standards page
What's New in JDBC 4.0? – Today.Java.Net
