Reese G. Database Programming with JDBC and Java

2nd edition: O’Reilly, 2001 — 250 p.
Database programming has traditionally been a technological Tower of Babel. We are faced with dozens of available database products, and each one talks to our applications in its own private language. If your application needs to talk to a new database engine, you have to teach it (and yourself) a new language. As Java programmers, however, we should not be worrying about such translation issues. Java is supposed to bring us the ability to "write once, compile once, and run anywhere," so it should bring it to us with database programming as well.
Java's JDBC API gives us a shared language through which our applications can talk to database engines. Following in the tradition of its other multi-platform APIs such as the AWT, JDBC provides us with a set of interfaces that create a common point at which database applications and database engines can meet. In this chapter, we will discuss the basic interfaces that JDBC provides.