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The center of the universe is a database

Java and its role in the corporate database

By William Blundon, JavaWorld.com, 07/01/96

Java holds great promise for a wide variety of computing, telecommunications, and entertainment applications. The world is rife with software products, but the center of the corporate universe is the database and the information it contains. The new JDBC database API to be finalized by JavaSoft this week is an excellent start as far as making Java a major component in corporate information systems. Creative developers don't have to wait for JDBC to connect to database servers today.

The corporate database

Designing, updating, securing, reporting, and disseminating information in databases is the chief occupation of the majority of information professionals, and this information may be stored in hierarchical, CODASYL, relational, object-relational, or object databases.

If you seek evidence of the importance of databases, consider the following: Five of the top dozen software companies (IBM, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Software A.G.) have built their businesses primarily on databases. The top 25 software companies are heavily skewed toward databases, database tools, and applications built on top of databases. And in the corporate world, product licensing and staffing costs are primarily oriented toward building, deploying, and maintaining database applications.

In order for Java to be a serious power in the enterprise, programmers must be able to write client applets, server servlets, and server applications that easily integrate with corporate databases. While the lure of Hollywood and the Internet may be painting Java as a tool to enliven Web sites with entertaining multimedia and interactivity, it is in the nuts-and-bolts world of data management that the language will either succeed or fail.

Java and JDBC

The JDBC specification has been available for review on JavaSoft's site on the World Wide Web since March and is expected to be finalized by the time you read this article. JDBC is built around three basic assumptions: Java must have native support for popular databases; the initial API should be built to include compatibility with existing database APIs like ODBC; and database support must range from remote access via applets through multitier applications distributed across servers.

Java must have native support for SQL databases at a minimum, and ideally must include support for SQL3, object-relational databases, and object databases. Object and object-relational databases are relatively easy to support because they are flexible enough to provide support for all Java data structures directly. Indeed, for many object database vendors like Object Design, supporting Java is easier than supporting the complete C++ data model as they do today. Mapping Java's object view of the world to the 2-D world of relational databases is a greater challenge, but simply accessing information from these sources through a low-level interface is not.

The JDBC API is an enhancement of concepts in widespread use through the call-level interface (CLI) originally defined by X/Open and popularized through Microsoft's ODBC. As a call-level interface, JDBC is a low-level standard, its primary purpose being to execute raw SQL statements and return their results to the caller (in many cases a browser). While SQL itself is a "standard," variants on that standard are supported by nearly every database vendor as a means toward product differentiation. This is particularly true in areas such as outer joins and stored procedures. JDBC is designed to pass any query string to the underlying database; it will permit access to extended SQL features at the potential risk of generating an error from data sources where the feature is not supported. The minimum level of SQL support required from a database product is SQL-2 Entry Level, on which most existing products can comfortably reside.

 

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