MySQL and mSQL

Dynamic Database Access

So far we have dealt with applications where you know exactly what needs to be done at compile time. If this were the only kind of database support that JDBC provided, no one could ever write tools like the mysql and msql interactive command line tools that determine SQL calls at runtime and execute them. The JDBC Statement class provides the execute() method for executing SQL that may be either a query or an update. Additionally, ResultSet instances provide runtime information about themselves in the form of an interface called ResultSetMetaData which you can access via the getMetaData() call in the ResultSet.

Meta Data

The term meta data sounds officious, but it is really nothing other than extra data about some object that would otherwise waste resources if it were actually kept in the object. For example, simple applications do not need the name of the columns associated with a ResultSet —the programmer probably knew that when the code was written. Embedding this extra information in the ResultSet class is thus not considered by JDBC’s designers to be core to the functionality of a ResultSet. Data such as the column names, however, is very important to some database programmers—especially those writing dynamic database access. The JDBC designers provide access to this extra information—the meta data—via the ResultSetMetaData interface. This class specifically provides:

• The number of columns in a result set

• Whether NULL is a valid value for a column

• The ...