JDBC for Computer Science and MCA students

Write a note on JDBC drivers.

A driver acts as an translator between the device and the programs that use the device. Every device has its own set of command that is known only by the driver. Most of the program access the devices by using the generic commands. Generic commands are accepted by the driver from a program and translates them into specialized commands for the device.

1. JDBC-ODBC Bridge:

• The translation of JDBC calls into ODBC calls and sending to the ODBC driver is done by this driver. These drivers are almost accessible to any database. These drivers are not portable. The client system demands the ODBC installation to use the driver.

2. Part Java, Part Native Driver:

• This driver translates the JDBC calls into a database-specific calls. This driver is database dependent. The communication layers in this drivers is less compared to type 1 driver and uses the database native api.

3. Intermediate database access server:

• The requests for the database using this driver passes to the middle-tier server through network. The middle-tier translates the requests to the database once the requests are passed to it. The presence of the vendor based library on the client system is not needed as it is server-based. This driver is portable and can be used for web applications. Data from multiple databases can be accessed by using this driver.

4. Pure Java Drivers:

• This driver uses the networking libraries of java in order to communicate directly with the database servers. These drivers were developed in java, so that they are portable, platform independent and deployment issues are eliminated. This driver is suitable for web applications. Installation of special software is not necessary and there drives can be downloaded dynamically. These drivers are vendor specific.