Article:		Flawed JDO Points the Way to the "Objectbase"
Subject:		JDBC 2.0 adoption
Date:		2002-04-27 00:40:01
From:		fontaineb
Thank you for your very interesting article that demonstrates the power of JDBC 2.0. It is a pitty that so few developers actually even know that this can be done in JDBC, so blinded by all the hype around entity EJBs and now JDO. My concern about the approach you demonstrate, however, is its actual "portability". JDBC 2.0 is around for quite a long time now and it is still difficult to find JDBC drivers (even costly ones) that can exploit JDBC 2.0-specific features like access to the object layer of ORDBMS, scrollable and updateable result sets, etc. Visibly, Oracle is quite capable. But what is the "state of the market" with regard to that type of solution? I would welcome a list of JDBC drivers/database combinations that are known to work with this solution (I say "known to work" because from experience there is often some gap between the supposed and actual capability of a JDBC driver due to poor implementation), and preferrably at a reasonable cost as far as many small companies can't afford big guns like Oracle. An advantage of JDO is that most implementations will probably only rely on JDBC 1.0 features and work even with free databases like MySQL and others.

Showing messages 1 through 5 of 5.

• MySQL
  2002-05-01 19:43:42  Donald Bales | [View]
  
  
  FWIW, I dropped a message to the MySQL folks. They stated that they intend to support stored procedures and UDTs in a future release.

• JDBC 2.0 Driver list
  2002-04-30 10:49:20  Donald Bales | [View]
  
  
  There are many drivers that support JDBC 2.0. You can find a list at: http://industry.java.sun.com/products/jdbc/drivers
• JDBC 2.0 Driver list
  2002-04-30 15:24:13  fontaineb [View]
  
  
  JDBC is just an API. Many of the JDBC drivers listed on Javasoft's Web site, and that are supposed to implement JDBC 2.0 capability indeed implement the API but:
  
  a) throw an Exception when you invoke JDBC 2.0-specific methods. A typical example is the previous() method of ResultSet. Another could be the updateRow() method.
  
  b) don't implement what the JDBC 2.0-specific technique is actually supposed to bring. A typical example is the batch update feature: the updates are often just sent one after the other.
  
  I would be glad to hear about a successful experience with a solution other than Oracle. If I take the example of PostgreSQL, a JDBC 2.0 driver is indeed available, but doesn't implement SQLInput and SQLOutput. Hence...
  (cf. http://lab.applinet.nl/postgresql-jdbc)
• JDBC 2.0 Driver list
  2002-04-30 16:28:52  Donald Bales | [View]
  
  
  What you say is true, many drivers list themselves as v2.0 but really aren't. That's because they are drivers for relational databases not object-relational. As far as I know, no "free" objectbase software exists. But that is not surprising. The current implementations of "free" relational databases still have not reached the Oracle7 milestone of implementation from the early 1990s. More important, Oracle9i is the first mature version of object-relational technology. And, that's why I believe it's time to start using objectbases instead of databases. A truly "usable" objectbase finally exists.
• JDBC 2.0 Driver list
  2002-04-30 14:45:11  fontaineb [View]
  
  
  JDBC is only an API. As a result, many of the JDBC drivers listed on Javasoft's Web site, and that are supposed to implement JDBC 2.0-capability actually only implement the API but:
  
  a) throw an Exception when you invoke JDBC 2.0-specific methods. A typicaFor example when you invoke previous() on a ResultSet.
  
  b) don't when you try to invoke