JDBC is the key Java technology for relational database access. Oracle is arguably the most widely used relational database platform in the world. In this book, Donald Bales brings these two technologies together, and shows you how to leverage the full power of Oracle's implementation of JDBC.

You begin by learning the all-important mysteries of establishing database connections. This can be one of the most frustrating areas for programmers new to JDBC, and Donald covers it well with detailed information and examples showing how to make database connections from applications, applets, Servlets, and even from Java programs running within the database itself.

Next comes thorough coverage of JDBC's relational SQL features. You'll learn how to issue SQL statements and get results back from the database, how to read and write data from large, streaming data types such as BLOBs, CLOBs, and BFILEs, and you'll learn how to interface with Oracle's other built-in programming language, PL/SQL.

If you're taking advantage of the Oracle's relatively new ability to create object tables and column objects based on user-defined datatypes, you'll be pleased with Don's thorough treatment of this subject. Don shows you how to use JPublisher and JDBC to work seamlessly with Oracle database objects from within Java programs. You'll also learn how to access nested tables and arrays using JDBC.

Donald concludes the book with a discussion of transaction management, locking, concurrency, and performance--topics that every professional JDBC programmer must be familiar with. If you write Java programs to run against an Oracle database, this book is a must-have.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 15 Ratings

Well written, but out of date - 2004-01-30
Reviewer Rating:
Let me start by saying that had I purchased this book 2 years ago when it was first released, I would have given it 5 stars.

This is a very well-written book, with good explanations and sample code. However, the book is fairly out of date, and much of the performance tuning suggestions he makes don't really apply as much when using the latest Oracle JDBC drivers and Oracle9 database. This book covers Oracle 8.1.6, and a lot of changes have been made between that release and 8.1.7 and Oracle9.

I recommend the newer "Oracle 9i JDBC Programming" book by Jason Price for much more current coverage of this topic.

Not bad, but.... - 2003-08-24
Reviewer Rating:
This book gives good coverage of Oracle's JDBC implementation. That is about as far as it goes. This is just too close to being documentation. When purchasing books on a specific technology, I am looking for the author's insight. Specific things the author learned while working with it. Give me best practices, suggestions, things to avoid, etc. Tell me what I won't learn from Oracle's docs, don't just rewrite them.

average book - 2003-04-24
Reviewer Rating:
Looks like most of the material came from oracle documentation. Examples are very basic

A workmanlike book which achieves its aims - 2003-09-11
Reviewer Rating:
This book is for Java developers who need to get the most out of using JDBC and Oracle (version 8.1.6). Choosing a specific database allows a lot more detail. Other JDBC books may skip database-dependent parts of the API; this book even gives code examples for the hard stuff. It is slow to read end-to-end, but "dipping" works well - there's almost always a helpful code example nearby.

There are problems, though. The author is obviously very familiar with Oracle, but lacks the experience to make comparisons with other products, this book won't help you choose when to use Oracle or whan another system might be more appropriate. Also I noticed other signs of lack of research - he sometimes gets abbreviations wrong, and the Java code is not particularly well-written.

The big problem for me is that the book assumes you only ever use Oracle. There is no consideration of code portability, it offers no wisdom about avoiding or encapsulating proprietary Oracle-specific extensions. The techniques in this book could easily lock your product into Oracle, worse, they might even lock your product into a specific version of Oracle.

The book has minor discussion of extra features in Oracle8i and Oracle9i, but nothing about JDBC 3. It's less helpful if you are using a version older than 8.1.6, too.

If you (or your management) have already sold your soul to Oracle, get this book. If you might need to use other databases, get a more generic book, but keep this one for those times when only a specific Oracle feature will do the trick.

A no-nonsense, well-written and well-organized introduction to the Java programming language with Oracle JDBC. - 2008-06-13
Reviewer Rating:
A no-nonsense, well-written and well-organized introduction to the Java programming language with Oracle JDBC. It uses a careful, example-based, easy to understand approach. A friendly and well-written book recommended for anyone ready to learn the power of Java programming language with Oracle JDBC.
Thank you

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