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Community: Java Enterprise Archives

Persistence Stew II: JDJ Article (JDBC - The Indipensible Component of Persistence Mechanisms)

A few weeks back, I worked feverishly to get an article ready for this months' (November 2005) edition of the Sys-con's Java Developer Journal, or as many people refer to it, the JDJ. Check out your pigeon hole mailbox, or head to JDJ online to read the article.

For this article, I delve into the details of matching your JDBC driver against the many choices in the Object-Relational-Mapping (ORM) mechanisms that are so prevalent in many of today's popular architectures. You can use the figure below as a reference. This is an excellent representation we put together that shows how can assemble an application that uses an ORM mechanism, coupled with a best of class JDBC driver and layer it on top of your relational data source.

While I specifically avoid any wide ranging discussion on the pros and cons of each ORM mechanism, but opt to peel back some of the layers to look exhaustively at the connectivity layer - this is something that all too often under discussed in many development organizations. The majority of today's ORM mechanisms live on top of relational databases, so it is a reasonable assertion to make that without an effective and informed investment in a connectivity layer from a best of breed JDBC driver, you risk loosing the productivity value-add an ORM mechanism to the disadvantage of your development organization.

Exception chaining in JDBC

By defining a group of methods that allow a Throwable instance to be set at the SQLException level, this allow related exceptions definition introduced in JDBC RowSets to also provide chaining support. Overloading the current set of constructors should achieve chaining functionality and compliment the four other currently defined constructors.

public SQLException(Throwable cause);

public SQLException(String reason, Throwable cause);

public SQLException(String reason, String sqlState, Throwable cause);

I guess I am writing with my Specification Lead hat on here, but I also want to be sure we correctly gauge the needs of the community, so I encourage you all to add your comments below. Over the next few weeks I also intend to write about how JDBC 4.0 is progressing and gauge the communities position as we progress through the Java Community Process.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.