Why Drivers Matter
A JDBC driver can make a world of difference in how well your application performs. Features supported by your JDBC driver are in fact critical to system performance. This is particularly true in enterprise database applications, and more so in applications accessing distributed data sources.
Many database products ship with their own JDBC drivers. So why should you purchase a separate driver when you already may get one free in your DBMS? There are several reasons. First, the handful of vendors who actually develop these drivers (most database vendors license their drivers) can offer you better support for their drivers than the database vendors can offer for drivers they only license. This is not surprising: Creating commercial-quality drivers is hard work. The driver creator would be expected to know the driver details better than anyone else—Driver design is what they do.
Many developers don't realize that their JDBC driver can be a performance bottleneck for their application because of issues like connection handling. They are pleasantly surprised, for example, when they upgrade their native database JDBC driver to a Type 3 or Type 4 JDBC product from a dedicated driver vendor. Many companies make major purchases of a JDBC driver vendor's product even when a version of that product is part of the DBMS that they already own.
As you look to the future, consider the features that JDBC 3.0 provides as a marker in deciding which driver to consider, including DataSource objects, connection pooling, distributed transaction support, RowSets, and prepared statement pooling. When possible, choose a vendor whose drivers work directly with database vendors APIs, and not drivers that have been reversed engineered to work with those APIs. The former type is typically a faster performer.
Type 3 and Type 4 drivers are the drivers to use when performance and compliance with Java standards is a must. It's extremely worthwhile to find a vendor whose drivers support the very latest versions of JDBC and the widest array of JDBC features. Another factor to consider is that different JDBC drivers offer tools that don't normally come with native DBMS drivers—tools that can be quite important in your development work.
