Derek Ashmore

As a consultant, developer and database administrator, I've often been asked to provide coding guidelines and tuning assistance for Java code that utilizes JDBC. Over time, I've been introduced to or developed standard coding practices that make JDBC code faster and less error-prone, and easier to read, understand and use. This article documents some of the more important "best practices" for using JDBC libraries to perform database access. As most of my clients are using Oracle database technologies, I've included several practices that are Oracle-specific. For the purposes of this article the goals of best practices for JDBC programming are maintainability, portability and performance. Maintainability refers to the ease with which developers can understand, debug and modify JDBC code that they didn't write. Portability refers to the ease with which JDBC code can ... (more)

Best Practices for JDBC Programming

While many new database persistence methods for Java programmers have been developed in recent years (e.g., entity beans, JDO, Hibernate, and many others), most database access code is still native JDBC. This statement doesn't express a preference, just an observation. Reasons for JDBC's popularity include: (1) it was first, (2) it works, and (3) most developers already know it. I first documented "best practices" for using the JDBC libraries for JDJ in April 2000 (Vol. 5, issue 4). For the purposes of this article, the "best practices" goals for JDBC programming are maintainabi... (more)

Strategies for Writing Java Stored ORACLE Databases

As of V8.i, Oracle developers can now write stored procedures, functions, packages and triggers in Java instead of PL/SQL (Oracle's proprietary procedural language), which provides some appealing options: We don't have to learn a proprietary (and thus limited-use) language to write stored objects for Oracle databases. We can get performance improvements over PL/SQL that make stored objects much more usable than they've been in the past. We can write code that's at least somewhat migratable to other database platforms should we wish to do so. I'll provide guidelines and strategies... (more)