When Sun Microsystems released the
first JDBC API 1.0 (Application
Programming Interface) in 1997, it had
several shortcomings, for instance the
interface to access SQL databases. JDBC
2.0 arrived with new features such as
cursors and batch files. Also, the Optional
Package, javax.sql as well as other
advanced features such as distributed
transactions or the RowSet interface
arrived.
JDBC 3.0 brought transactional
intermediate saving points and support for
SQL99 types of data. The optional
packages have been included in the Java
1.4 distribution. JDBC 4.0 provides
support for SQL 2003 but also extended
support for CLOB (Character Large
OBject) and BLOB (Binary Large OBject).
Currently, the Java API includes a
JDBC-ODBC driver (Open Database
Connectivity-Java Database Connectivity)
that allows the JDBC driver access to a
native system database, when an ODBC
native system driver exists for that
database. The Java API
does not include drivers for all
databases. The existence of a common
programming interface brings several
benefits. Otherwise, if any database creator
would built its own API, that would lead to
thousands of ways of programming
databases, so any interface would have to
be known. Luckily the software industry
has chosen the JDBC standard, easying the
work of developers, and allowing the
creation of robust and scalable
applications