Working With JDBC
Connecting to a database In order to connect to a database, you need to perform some initialization first. Your JDBC driver has to be loaded by the Java Virtual Machine classloader, and your application needs to check to see that the driver was successfully loaded. We'll be using the ODBC bridge driver, but if your database vendor supplies a JDBC driver, feel free to use it instead. // Attempt to load database driver try { // Load Sun's jdbc-odbc driver Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver").newInstance(); } catch (ClassNotFoundException cnfe) // driver not found { System.err.println ("Unable to load database driver"); System.err.println ("Details : " + cnfe); System.exit(0); } We try to load the JdbcOdbcDriver class, and then catch the ClassNotFoundException if it is thrown. This is important, because the application might be run on a non-Sun virtual machine that doesn't include the ODBC bridge, such as Microsoft's J...