Steven
Have you seen the
JDBC tutorial at Sun's site. It is pretty good and gives decent examples of how to get started.
Not all databases have a specific
Java driver, although, I would think that most, if not all, Oracle products will. Places to look would be the companies web site or even a general search on the web should find one for you. If it is a DB that can use ODBC you can use the JDBC-ODBC bridge driver that should come with your install.
If the getConnection method returned fine and didn't throw any exceptions then, yes, you did connect to the database.
hope that helps