Java Database Connectivity

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the programming language Java, that defines how a client may access a database. It is part of the Java Standard Edition platform, from Oracle Corporation. It provides methods to query and update data in a database, and is oriented towards relational databases. A JDBC-to-ODBC bridge enables connections to any ODBC-accessible data source in the Java virtual machine (JVM) host environment.

History and implementation

Sun Microsystems released JDBC as part of Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1 on February 19, 1997. Since then it has been part of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE).

The JDBC classes are contained in the Java package java.sql and javax.sql.

Starting with version 3.1, JDBC has been developed under the Java Community Process. JSR 54 specifies JDBC 3.0 (included in J2SE 1.4), JSR 114 specifies the JDBC Rowset additions, and JSR 221 is the specification of JDBC 4.0 (included in Java SE 6).