DriverManager

Overview

The DriverManager class keeps track of the drivers that are available and handles establishing connections databases and drivers.

The javax.sql package (JDBC 2.0 Standard Extension API), provides the DataSource interface as an alternate and preferred means of connecting to a data source.

For simple applications, use DriverManager.getConnection to establish a connection to a database.

Keeping Track of Available Drivers

The DriverManager class maintains a list of Driver classes that have registered themselves by calling the method DriverManager.registerDriver. All Driver classes should be written with a static section (a static initializer) that creates an instance of the class and then registers it with the DriverManager class when it is loaded. Thus, a user would not normally call DriverManager.registerDriver directly; it should be called automatically by a Driver class when it is loaded. A Driver class is loaded, and therefore automatically registered with the DriverManager, in one of two ways:

  1. by calling the method Class.forName. This explicitly loads the driver class. Since it does not depend on any external setup, this way of loading a driver is the recommended one for using the DriverManager framework. The following code loads the class acme.db.Driver: 

    Class.forName("acme.db.Driver");

    If acme.db.Driver has been written so that loading it causes an instance to be created and also calls DriverManager.registerDriver with that instance as the parameter (as it should do), then it is in the DriverManager's list of drivers and available for creating a connection.

  2. by adding the Driver class to the java.lang.System property jdbc.drivers. This is a list of driver classnames, separated by colons, that the DriverManager class loads. When the DriverManager class is initialized, it looks for the system property "jdbc.drivers," and if the user has entered one or more drivers, the DriverManager class attempts to load them. The following code illustrates how a programmer might enter three driver classes in ~/.hotjava/properties (HotJava loads these into the system properties list on startup): 

jdbc.drivers=foo.bah.Driver:dbname.sql.Driver:bad.test.ourDriver

The first call to a DriverManager method will automatically cause these driver classes to be loaded.

Note that this second way of loading drivers requires a preset environment that is persistent. If there is any doubt about that being the case, it is safer to call the method Class.forName to explicitly load each driver. This is also the right method to use to bring in a particular driver since once the DriverManager class has been initialized, it will never recheck the jdbc.drivers property list.

In both of these cases, it is the responsibility of the newly-loaded Driver class to register itself by calling DriverManager.registerDriver. As mentioned, this should be done automatically when the class is loaded.

For security reasons, the JDBC management layer will keep track of which class loader provided which driver. Then when the DriverManager class is opening a connection, it will use only drivers that come from the local file system or from the same class loader as the code issuing the request for a connection.

Establishing a Connection

Once the Driver classes have been loaded and registered with the DriverManager class, they are available for establishing a connection with a database. When a request for a connection is made with a call to the DriverManager.getConnection method, the DriverManager tests each driver in turn to see if it can establish a connection.

It may sometimes be the case that more than one JDBC driver is capable of connecting to a given URL. For example, when connecting to a given remote database, it might be possible to use a JDBC-ODBC bridge driver, a JDBC-to-generic-network-protocol driver, or a driver supplied by the database vendor. In such cases, the order in which the drivers are tested is significant because the DriverManager will use the first driver it finds that can successfully connect to the given URL.

First the DriverManager tries to use each driver in the order it was registered. (The drivers listed in jdbc.drivers are always registered first.) It will skip any drivers that are untrusted code unless they have been loaded from the same source as the code that is trying to open the connection.

It tests the drivers by calling the method Driver.connect on each one in turn, passing them the URL that the user originally passed to the method DriverManager.getConnection. The first driver that recognizes the URL makes the connection.

At first glance this may seem inefficient, but it requires only a few procedure calls and string comparisons per connection since it is unlikely that dozens of drivers will be loaded concurrently.

The following code is an example of all that is normally needed to set up a connection with a driver such as a JDBC-ODBC bridge driver. 

Class.forName("jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver"); 
String url = "jdbc:odbc:fred";
Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(url, "userID", "passwd");

The variable con represents a connection to the data source "fred" that can be used to create and execute SQL statements.

With the addition of the JDBC 2.0 Standard Extension API, a DataSource object can be used to establish a connection with a data source. The DriverManager can still be used, but a DataSource object offers several advantages over the DriverManager and is the preferred alternative. Developers who are writing Enterprise JavaBeans components, however, should always use a DataSource object instead of the DriverManager. Using a properly implemented DataSource object is the only way to get connections that are pooled and that can participate in distributed transactions.

DriverManager Methods Are Static

All DriverManager methods are declared static, which means that they operate on the class as a whole and not on particular instances. In fact, the constructor for DriverManager is declared private to prevent users from instantiating it. Logically, there is one instance of the DriverManager class. This means that methods are called by qualifying them with DriverManager, as in the following line of code. 

DriverManager.setLogWriter(out);