Inside JDBC

The guidelines for creating the JDBC architecture all center on one very important characteristic—simplicity. Databases are complex beasts, and companies that rely on them generally have an army of personnel ready to administer and program them. As a result, transferring that complexity to Java via JDBC would violate the ethos of the language. Therefore, the JDBC architects developed the specification with the idea that database access would not require advanced degrees and years of training to accomplish.

Knowing full well that there are a plethora of databases in existence today, the architectural challenge for JDBC was to provide a simple front-end interface for connecting with even the most complex of databases. To the programmer, the interface to a database should be the same regardless of the kind of database to which you want to connect. Figure 4-1 shows the 50,000-foot view of our JDBC application model.