Regarding Oracle thin and thick drivers

[Sunil Aggarwal]

Hi All,

Could please throw some light on the following doubts that i have:

1. I am using a Oracle "ojdbc14.jar" driver jar.

a. Is it right that it a thin driver?
b. If yes, but then when i do a test connection, it passes for both thin and thick(oci) URLs. How this possible?

2. For a test connection, i want to use a URL which should not require a server name value and this possible using oci(thick) driver URL.

So can i safely use (oci)thick driver URL for thin driver "ojdbc.jar"?

Please help me on this.

Thank you.

[Shailesh Chandra]

Originally posted by Sunil Aggarwal:
Is it right that it a thin driver?

If you are using thin driver string to connect then Yes, below is description on Oracle's JDBC Driver,hope your doubt would be clear after reading this

Oracle 8i provides four types of JDBC drivers, namely, thin drivers, OCI drivers,
server-side thin drivers, and server-side internal drivers. These client-side and server-side drivers provide the same functionality and have the same syntax and APIs and they share the same Oracle extensions. The difference lies in how they connect to the database and how they transfer data.

Oracle JDBC Thin Driver

This driver is a Type 4 (Proprietary Protocol-Net) driver and is written in 100% pure Java making it platform independent. It allows a direct Connection to the database.It implements the TCP/IP protocol that emulates Oracle's Net8 and TTC (the wire protocol of OCI) on top of Java sockets. Java applets are good candidates that make use of this driver.This driver gives the maximum portability.

Oracle JDBC OCI Driver

This is a native-API Type 2 driver that is suited for client-server Java applications. It is Oracle platform-specific and requires an Oracle client installation. This driver converts JDBC calls into calls to the Oracle Call Interface using native methods. These calls are then sent to the Oracle database server using Net8. These drivers support protocols such as IPC, named pipes, TCP/IP, and IPX/SPX. This driver gives the maximum performance for an Oracle client application.


Shailesh
[ June 23, 2005: Message edited by: Shailesh Chandra ]