Chapter 11. JDBC

These common thoughts are expressed in a shared public language, consisting of shared signs... a sign has a "sense" that fixes the reference and is "grasped by everybody" who knows the language...

—Noam Chomsky, Language and Thought

JDBC is one of the oldest programming APIs in the Java platform. In fact, it is the first of the enterprise APIs that eventually became the J2EE platform. Its goal is to create a shared public language for Java access to any database engine.

SQL lies at the heart of the JDBC API. I therefore assume a basic knowledge of SQL in this chapter. Chapter 10 contains a SQL tutorial if you need some background.