Customer Reviews

Java Programming with Oracle JDBC

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I'm prototyping an Oracle database application "engine" for use in a planning and estimation application (as in project management). The idea was to use Java and Oracle 8i's object-relational features, specifically to take advantage of performance improvements and generally to get the advantages of object oriented design. I had reached the point of implementing Oracle's CustomDatum interface when I got this book. I was initially disappointed when I opened the book and found it discussed on the last eleven pages of the section on Object-Relational SQL. But then I read the Introduction, the first chapter, and on and on....
It's immediately obvious Mr. Bales is familiar with actual process of developing real applications. He has presented this complex and complicated subject in a direct and pleasant manner for advanced programmers. Relatively new to Java but very familiar with Oracle, I found his organization of the material very helpful - and the sections on Relational SQL and Object-Relational SQL based on sound knowledge and experience. Mr. Bales includes a final Section on Essentials where he discusses transactions and locking, performance and trouble shooting - all very practical and extremely useful if you are developing serious applications. And yes, those last eleven pages were very helpful.
I have not found a book that addresses using Oracle JDBC in application development directly, and have found few books that address database application development very well - but this book does both. One small thing I thought was missing were guidelines for using weakly typed object SQL vice strongly typed - in other areas good advice was offered.
Before I bought this book, I used Oracle's documentation at otn.oracle.com. This required a file of bookmarks, several large block diagrams, lots of notes and much patience. It's much better to start with this book - and get a well-organized and coherent view along with practical advice and examples, before wading into Oracle's extensive documentation.

Larry Johnson
KeepItSimpleEngineering,Inc. (...)

An excellent coverage of Oracle's implementation of JDBC, this book beats your expectations

Meet the middle ground where the strengths of Java and Oracle work in synergy - the JDBC. Whether making simple database connections or using the Oracle 8i's sophisticated object-relational features, the authors peel the onion very well with detailed information and cleverly written examples. After a brief overview of JDBC, several different types of database clients are discussed in detail - the applets, the Servlets, the Server side internal drivers and those managed by J2EE using JNDI and connection pooling.

A whole section is dedicated to modes of interaction between Java programs and the JDBC API such as using cursors, submitting prepared statements and ResultSet manipulation. A great deal of good advice is offered to help you choose between the options. The chapter on Object-Relational SQL covers broad ground on both Weakly Typed Object SQL and Strongly Typed Object SQL.

Enterprise essentials such as Security, locking, transaction management supports for data encryption and SSL issues, performance tuning and testing strategies - are addressed in detail. This book is treasure trove if newer feats of Oracle are of Interest to you. I found immediate application for features such as creating object tables and column objects based on user-defined data types, support for really big streaming data types such as BFILEs and LONG RAW and batch processing for my project.

Overall, this book has everything you need to learn, know and master in order to leverage the essential two great technologies - JDBC and Oracle. Every serious Java developer should have this at arms reach.

Let me start by saying that had I purchased this book 2 years ago when it was first released, I would have given it 5 stars.

This is a very well-written book, with good explanations and sample code. However, the book is fairly out of date, and much of the performance tuning suggestions he makes don't really apply as much when using the latest Oracle JDBC drivers and Oracle9 database. This book covers Oracle 8.1.6, and a lot of changes have been made between that release and 8.1.7 and Oracle9.

I recommend the newer "Oracle 9i JDBC Programming" book by Jason Price for much more current coverage of this topic.

In general, I liked this book. It is what you would expect from O'Reilly. Detailed enough, but not wordy. Very practical, yet not simplistic. The book addresses most of the issues that real-life developers face every day.
It covers establishing database connection in sufficient details, all basic SQL commands and the best practices on using them. Highlights the differences between Statement, PreparedStatement, and CallableStatement and zooms in on Oracle way of implementing them.
Shows quite a few little "cotchas" that are not easy to spot on your own.
I didn't find chapters on object-relational SQL very useful, but I guess that the book should have had that for completeness of coverage.
Also, I'd like to argue with author's performance tests. The author used INSERT statement for tests, but it is SELECT statement that incurres additional overhead of metadata passing. If the author used SELECT statements when comparing performance of Statement vs. PreparedStatement, he would probably found PreparedStatement perform better. Also his tests assume single user database connection. If there are many (like hundreds) of open database connections, PreparedStatement will scale better because of database-side caching. Especially if you can use Oracle MTS.
But this is really not that important, the book is not about JDBC performance tuning.
I also totally agree with the statement that the author keeps repeating throughout the book: "Use the set-oriented nature of SQL to its fullest". That's the best single pefrormance improvement that one can do to JDBC-related code.
I highly recommend this book to everyone who is working with Oracle JDBC. Our team has been using Oracle JDBC for about 2 years now, and yet after reading this book I could easily spot at least three problems in our design/code.

This book gives good coverage of Oracle's JDBC implementation. That is about as far as it goes. This is just too close to being documentation. When purchasing books on a specific technology, I am looking for the author's insight. Specific things the author learned while working with it. Give me best practices, suggestions, things to avoid, etc. Tell me what I won't learn from Oracle's docs, don't just rewrite them.

Looks like most of the material came from oracle documentation. Examples are very basic

This book is for Java developers who need to get the most out of using JDBC and Oracle (version 8.1.6). Choosing a specific database allows a lot more detail. Other JDBC books may skip database-dependent parts of the API; this book even gives code examples for the hard stuff. It is slow to read end-to-end, but "dipping" works well - there's almost always a helpful code example nearby.

There are problems, though. The author is obviously very familiar with Oracle, but lacks the experience to make comparisons with other products, this book won't help you choose when to use Oracle or whan another system might be more appropriate. Also I noticed other signs of lack of research - he sometimes gets abbreviations wrong, and the Java code is not particularly well-written.

The big problem for me is that the book assumes you only ever use Oracle. There is no consideration of code portability, it offers no wisdom about avoiding or encapsulating proprietary Oracle-specific extensions. The techniques in this book could easily lock your product into Oracle, worse, they might even lock your product into a specific version of Oracle.

The book has minor discussion of extra features in Oracle8i and Oracle9i, but nothing about JDBC 3. It's less helpful if you are using a version older than 8.1.6, too.

If you (or your management) have already sold your soul to Oracle, get this book. If you might need to use other databases, get a more generic book, but keep this one for those times when only a specific Oracle feature will do the trick.

Finally a book that spoon feeds me JDBC!! As a developer who does limited JDBC development,
I appreciate the simple yet comprehensive nature of the written material. I have other related SQL books where the writer's
more interested in showing you how bright he is rather than teach you how to use JDBC. I find the written material in this book very
easy to find and the many examples very easy to understand.
Don, thanks for writing your book in layman's terms!!

I had no knowledge of JDBC prior to getting this book. The author does an excellent job of explaining his code examples and builds on the examples throughout the book. Well written and an excellent technical resource as you would expect from O'Reilly books.

Having just completed Bales' book, I found that it provided answers to a number of things that were previously only "fuzzy" in my knowledge in terms of applying the JDBC to the Oracle world. His explanation of the different forms of connections clarified quite a lot.

Likewise, the numerous references to the "thin driver" and the banchmark figures revealing that it was either close to or exceeded the performance of the OCI driver was another eye opener (and enhanced the portability of my Oracle/JDBC code).

The examples are all comprehensible and they really do work. It's obvious the author thought these through and tested them.

The only drawback (and it's covered by the author in the preface) is that examples and pathing presume a Windows platform -- in spite of his preference for Unix. That can be forgiven..and it only cost a single star in this review. :-)