| Title: | Database Programming with JDBC™ and Java™, Second Edition |
| Author: | George Reese |
| Publisher | O'Reilly & Associates |
| Publication date: | August 2000 |
| ISBN: | 1-56592-616-1 |
"A different kind of animal" was the one-time tagline of O'Reilly & Associates. Whoever at O'Reilly came up with that slogan had undoubtedly just browsed a copy of Database Programming with JDBC™ and Java™. The book is indeed a different kind of animal—specifically, a rather bizarre two-headed creature. As you would imagine, this poor beast tends to be rather confused about where it is going and whom it is facing.
The first half of the book focuses, not surprisingly, on the core JDBC APIs, including a brief ten-page chapter on the basic concepts of relational databases and SQL. Chapter 3 introduces the basic JDBC classes and interfaces—how to obtain a Connection from a DriverManager; using Statement objects to execute queries and updates; using ResultSet objects to examine the results of a query. It also discusses the mapping between SQL datatypes and Java datatypes. Chapter 4 covers the use of PreparedStatements to execute precompiled SQL, and CallableStatements for stored procedures, as well as other more esoteric issues: the batch processing APIs, advanced datatypes including BLOBs and CLOBs, and meta-data. Chapter 5 covers the JDBC 2.0 Optional Package, which is an important part of the J2EE platform. This includes the DataSource interface (which replaces DriverManager as the preferred way to obtain database connections), support for connection pooling, the RowSet interface, and support for distributed transactions (that is, transactions that involve more than one database).
While there are few examples, at least by O'Reilly standards, the first part of the book provides a fairly complete overview of the JDBC APIs. At this point, however, the book takes an unexpected turn. After spending a chapter discussing various other Java enterprise technologies (JNDI, RMI, object serialization, EJB), the author proceeds to spend four chapters developing, at least in outline, a complete distributed component framework. This is an ambitious and challenging project, but seems entirely out of place in an introductory book on JDBC. Instead of describing EJB in detail (in any case, not what the book is supposed to be about), the author effectively reinvents it. Thus, chapter 7 focuses on architectural issues and design patterns, while chapter 8 discusses the non-persistence aspects of the framework, including security and transactions. Chapter 9 focuses on the actual persistence framework, and is the only chapter in this half of the book that actually makes use of JDBC. Chapter 10 describes a client application with a graphical user interface based on Swing. The example used throughout these chapters is that of a banking application. Of course, in a little over a hundred pages the author is able only to scratch the surface of issues such as transaction monitors, instance pooling, relationship mapping and so forth.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the material in Database Programming—it's just difficult to know who the intended audience is. Readers new to JDBC will probably do better with a book that provides more introductory examples, while those with a serious interest in Java distributed component models are unlikely to require a JDBC tutorial. If, however, you are a JDBC novice who dreams of writing your own EJB container from scratch, then good luck to you. This stange animal might well be the perfect companion for your journey.