We’re Hacking JDBC, so You Don’t Have To

Lukas EderApril 17th, 2014Last Updated: January 5th, 2015

2 50 2 minutes read

We love working with JDBC

Said no one. Ever.

On a more serious note, JDBC is actually a very awesome API, if you think about it. It is probably also one of the very reasons Java has become the popular platform it is today. Before the JDK 1.1, and before ODBC (and that’s a very long time ago) it was hard to imagine any platform that would standardise database access at all. Heck, SQL itself was hardly even standardised at the time and along came Java with JDBC, a simple API with only few items that you have to know of in every day work:

Connection: the object that models all your DB interactions
PreparedStatement: the object that lets you execute a statement
ResultSet: the object that lets you fetch data from the database

That’s it!

Back to reality

That was the theory. In practice, enterprise software operating on top of JDBC quickly evolved towards this:

Hacking JDBC. Image copyright information on this page

JDBC is one of the last resorts for Java developers, where they can feel like real hackers, hacking this very stateful, very verbose, very arcane API in many ways. Pretty much everyone operating on JDBC will implement wrappers around the API to prevent at least:

Common syntax errors
Bind variable index mismatches
Dynamic SQL construction
Edge cases around the usage LOBs
Resource handling and closing
Array and UDT management
Stored procedure abstraction

… and so much more.

So while everyone is doing the above infrastructure work, they’re not working on their business logic. And pretty much everyone does these things, when working with JDBC. Hibernate and JPA do not have most these problems, but they’re not SQL APIs any longer, either.

Here are a couple of examples that we have been solving inside of jOOQ, so you don’t have to:

How to fetch generated keys in some databases

case DERBY:
case H2:
case MARIADB:
case MYSQL: {
    try {
        listener.executeStart(ctx);
        result = ctx.statement().executeUpdate();
        ctx.rows(result);
        listener.executeEnd(ctx);
    }

    // Yes. Not all warnings may have been consumed yet
    finally {
        consumeWarnings(ctx, listener);
    }

    // Yep. Should be as simple as this. But it isn't.
    rs = ctx.statement().getGeneratedKeys();

    try {
        List<Object> list = new ArrayList<Object>();

        // Some JDBC drivers seem to illegally return null
        // from getGeneratedKeys() sometimes
        if (rs != null) {
            while (rs.next()) {
                list.add(rs.getObject(1));
            }
        }

        // Because most JDBC drivers cannot fetch all
        // columns, only identity columns
        selectReturning(ctx.configuration(), list.toArray());
        return result;
    }
    finally {
        JDBCUtils.safeClose(rs);
    }
}

How to handle BigInteger and BigDecimal

else if (type == BigInteger.class) {
    // The SQLite JDBC driver doesn't support BigDecimals
    if (ctx.configuration().dialect() == SQLDialect.SQLITE) {
        return Convert.convert(rs.getString(index),
                               (Class) BigInteger.class);
    }
    else {
        BigDecimal result = rs.getBigDecimal(index);
        return (T) (result == null ? null :
                    result.toBigInteger());
    }
}
else if (type == BigDecimal.class) {
    // The SQLite JDBC driver doesn't support BigDecimals
    if (ctx.configuration().dialect() == SQLDialect.SQLITE) {
        return Convert.convert(rs.getString(index),
                               (Class) BigDecimal.class);
    }
    else {
        return (T) rs.getBigDecimal(index);
    }
}

How to fetch all exceptions from SQL Server

switch (configuration.dialect().family()) {
    case SQLSERVER:
        consumeLoop: for (;;)
            try {
                if (!stmt.getMoreResults() &&
                     stmt.getUpdateCount() == -1)
                    break consumeLoop;
            }
            catch (SQLException e) {
                previous.setNextException(e);
                previous = e;
            }
}

Convinced?

This is nasty code. And we have more examples of nasty code here, or in our source code.

All of these examples show that when working with JDBC, you’ll write code that you don’t want to / shouldn’t have to write in your application. This is why…