## JDBC connections

JDBC is a Java API for executing SQL statements. It consists of a set of classes and interfaces written in the Java programming language which enables SQL statements to be executed against virtually any relational database.

The JDBC-ODBC bridge allows ODBC drivers to be used as JDBC drivers. This bridge is a JDBC driver which implements JDBC operations by translating them into ODBC operations. To ODBC it appears as a normal application program.

Notes:

- In JReport Designer, not all the data types supported by JDBC can be used. The data types that supported in JReport Designer are: Bit, Tinyint, Smallint, Integer, Bigint, Float, Real, Double, Number, Decimal, Char, VarChar, LongVarChar, Date, Time, TimeStamp, Binary, LongVarBinary, Blob, Clob, Array, nVarChar, and Distinct.
- For the Blob, Clob, and Array types, you cannot browse their data in the Catalog Browser. And for the Distinct type, due to a limitation of JDK, the based SQL Type cannot be obtained. So you need to indicate it manually after you import these types of data.
- The JDBC-ODBC bridge is not supported by JDK 8.

This chapter describes the following tasks related to JDBC connections:

- Setting up the JDBC driver
- Setting up a JDBC connection
- Setting up OOJDBC connections
- DBMS objects in a JDBC connection