Rating: 

Most of the space is still devoted to Reese's rather academic vision of architecture of a banking application, which isn't the most common use for Enterprise Java, at all. This material might serve well as a chapter or two in "Java Design", should O'Reilly choose to publish such a text.

What this books says about JDBC per se, is fully covered (and explained better, I think), in "Java Enterprise In a Nutshell".

In summary, I regret to state that this is one book that O'Reilly seems to have published just because JDBC is widely used, and not because the book has anything of particular value to say on the topic.