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Connecting to the Database: JDBC, ODBC, and SQL

Once upon a time, every database was a land unto itself. There was very little standardization, and what worked in one database was virtually guaranteed not to work in another. And forget about having them talk to each other, unless you were willing to spend a great deal of time and money.

Fortunately, that's no longer the case for the major databases. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the database industry agreed on a Standard Query Language, or SQL, which is used to put data into the database, and to get it out again.

Also in the 1990s, Microsoft created the Open Database Connectivity standard, or ODBC. ODBC is a standard API that vendors can write to that allows any program to talk to any ODBC-compliant ...