Customer Reviews

JDBC Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The 600 page "JDBC Recipes" might make a decent 100 page book. Some problem/solutions are repeated verbatim and others are repeated with minimal changes. For example, there are at least 8 distinct sections on closing a database resource. The BLOB/CLOB and Statement/PreparedStatement chapters are at least 50% identical.

Despite all this repetition, coverage manages to be spotty on other topics. For example, CallableStatements are barely mentioned. Many ways are presented of doing a task, but the tradeoffs aren't covered. Except for connection pooling, there weren't many comments about JDBC in practice.

The stated audience is developers knowing the basics of Java, JDBC and databases. Examples span 1-4 pages of code with only minimal, high-level comments afterwards. Experienced developers know most of this stuff and shouldn't have to plow thru so much code to discern the important points.

The examples are tailored to Oracle and mySql. If you want to write code without vendor lock-in, this book doesn't help. The cover says "Java EE 5 compliant." While true, this is misleading. Most references are to the 1.4 JavaDoc. The 5.0 references don't use the new features.

The book serves a very narrow audience. If you want to copy/paste Oracle/mySql code verbatim, the book's website is very useful. If you have a database framework, want cross-database compatibility, best practices or are simply reading for understanding, I recommend a different book.

I used some of the examples from this book (by cut-and-paste -- just chnaged the db URL, user/password) and they worked great. I needed to write some code for handling images and the BLOB code examples provided very good starting point.

Thanks.
Alex Hanif
alex.hanif@yahoo.com

Do you like to read about programming? or Do you like to see the code with your own
eyes? I like to see it with my own eyes. Mahmoud Parsain has compiled a see it for yourself
book on the JDBC (Java Database Connectivity). If you like Java and you do any work with Databases
then you should read this book. It provides many many examples (Recipes) you can see and learn from to
create the Database solutions you need.
Here are some of the items covered and coded in the book: Making Connections, Drivers, Connection pools,
Using DataSource class, ResultSet class, Scrollable and updatable ResultSets, working with BLOBs and CLOBs,
Handeling Date, Time and Timestamps, JDBC Exceptions, PreparedStatements, working with Parameters and
PreparedStatements. The book has all you need to simply add, update, delete records in your databases or
to create tables, perform transactions, and roll back transactions if necessary.
The book focuses on Oracle and MySQL type databases but this is not a draw back. All the examples can
be applied to various other types such as Derby, SqlServer, Teradata, DB2, SqlLite, Sysbase ect. I am a ETL
developer (Extract, Translate, and Load) for warehouse databases and I was able to easily apply this code
to create my own simple Sql ETL application to move data from one RDBMS to another.
There were two items in the book that I did not find. One was the setMaxRows statment which can be
handy to limit the number of rows being returned from the database. The other was the getTypeInfo call that is
part of the DatabaseMetadata class. You can use the getTypeInfo call to get a list of the data types the
database you are connecting to supports. However, even with these missing the book hits just about every
other property and method commonly used in the JDBC api.
Mahmoud Parsian has done a great job in providing such a comprehensive set of JDBC code examples
that are simple to follow. Apress has produced another great reference for the Java programmer to have
on the shelf.

This book is made for the J2EE enthusiast. It has plenty of good code exampled for both Oracle and MySql connections. I would recommend this to J2EE users only. I would not recommend this to any new users though. It is written in such away that if you have no basic JDBC knowledge, it would be a confusing experience. Overall I found this book very helpful.