The JDBC API is a Java API that can access any kind of tabular data, especially data stored in a Relational Database.

JDBC helps you to write java applications that manage these three programming activities:

  1. Connect to a data source, like a database
  2. Send queries and update statements to the database
  3. Retrieve and process the results received from the database in answer to your query

    The following simple code fragment gives a simple example of these three steps:

    Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection
           ( "jdbc:myDriver:wombat", "myLogin","myPassword");
			  
Statement stmt = con.createStatement();
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT a, b, c FROM Table1");
while (rs.next()) {
	int x = rs.getInt("a");
	String s = rs.getString("b");
	float f = rs.getFloat("c");
	}

    This short code fragment instantiates a DriverManager object to connect to a database driver and log into the database, instantiates a Statement object that carries your SQL language query to the database; instantiates a ResultSet object that retrieves the results of your query, and executes a simple while loop, which retrieves and displays those results. It's that simple.