What properties should I supply to a database driver in order to connect to a database?

Created Nov 29, 1999

Lennart Jorelid

Most JDBC drivers should accept 3 properties:

user
password
hostname

However, a JDBC driver may accept an arbitrary number of properties thrown at it. Drivers can be interrogated for their supported properties using the DriverPropertyInfo metadata class. Most drivers will also contain documentation which should specify all properties and their meaning for creating the jdbc database connection.

NOTE! The JDBC/ODBC bridge driver does not properly return an array of DriverPropertyInfo objects, but instead throws a NullPointerException. Other database drivers work better in this respect.

public static void printPropertyInfo(Driver aDriver, 
    String jdbcURL, 
    Properties daProps) throws Exception
  {
    // Get the DriverPropertyInfo of the given driver
    DriverPropertyInfo[] props = 
      aDriver.getPropertyInfo(jdbcURL, daProps);

    // If the driver is poorly implemented, 
    //   a null object may be returned.
    if(props == null) return;

      System.out.println("Resolving properties for: " + 
        aDriver.getClass().getName());

      // List all properties.
      for(int i = 0; i  props.length; i++)
      {
        // Get the property metadata
        String    propName    = props[i].name;
        String[]  propChoices = props[i].choices;
        boolean   req         = props[i].required;
        String    propDesc    = props[i].description;

        // Printout
        System.out.println("" + propName + 
          " (Req: " + req + ")");
        if(propChoices == null)
        {
          System.out.println("  No choices.");
        }
        else
        {
          System.out.print("  Choices: ");
          for(int j = 0; j  propChoices.length; j++)
          {
            System.out.print(" " + propChoices[j]);
          }
        }

        System.out.println("  Desc: " + propDesc);
      }
    }
  }