Organization of This Book

This book is divided into three distinct sections. The first two sections are the meat of this book: best practices for Java database architecture and development. The first section focuses on the architecture aspect and the second section on the development aspect.

Part I

Chapter 1 is an overview of the art of database programming. It examines the various tools and skills needed for database programming and covers common database application architectures. The chapter is mostly review material for experienced database programmers.

Chapter 2 tackles one of the more difficult aspects of database programming, especially for the object-oriented programmer: data architecture. This chapter begins with relational theory and covers critical topics such as normalization and object-relational modeling. It is a very important chapter for database programmers of all levels of experience.

Though relational architecture is one of the more difficult aspects of database programming, transaction management is where database programmers make most of their mistakes. Chapter 3 covers transactions and transaction management.

Part II

The second section begins with an overview of persistence concepts. In short, persistence is the practice of saving application state to a data store. Chapter 4 introduces this practice with an eye on using relational databases as your data store for Java applications.

Chapter 5 through Chapter 8 go into the best practices for different Java persistence models. Chapter 5 begins with container-managed persistence under the Enterprise JavaBeans component model—for Versions 1 and 2. Chapter 6 tackles the other EJB persistence model, bean-managed persistence. Chapter 7 dives into an evolving, popular persistence model, Java Data Objects. Finally, Chapter 8 looks at alternatives to the standard Java persistence models.

Part III

The third section of the book contains tutorials on the core technologies covered in this book. No reader should need to read all of the tutorial chapters. Instead, I expect that most readers will be familiar with the subject in several, but not all, of the tutorial chapters. The tutorial chapters provide the basic knowledge necessary to understand key concepts used in the first two sections. Don't look to any of the tutorial chapters to make you an expert in its subject matter. I have provided tutorials on the J2EE platform (Chapter 9), SQL (Chapter 10), JDBC (Chapter 11), and JDO (Chapter 12).

I recommend reading the first two sections in order, breaking that order only to refer to a tutorial chapter for a subject on which you lack familiarity.