JDBC Drivers

SAP Sybase IQ supports the following JDBC drivers:

• SQL Anywhere JDBC 4.0 driver – This driver communicates with SAP Sybase IQ using the Command Sequence client/server protocol. Its behavior is consistent with ODBC, embedded SQL, and OLE DB applications. The SQL Anywhere JDBC 4.0 driver is the recommended JDBC driver for connecting to SAP Sybase IQ databases. The JDBC 4.0 driver can be used only with JRE 1.6 or later.

  The JDBC 4.0 driver takes advantage of the new automatic JDBC driver registration. Hence, if an application wants to make use of the JDBC 4.0 driver, it no longer needs to perform a Class.forName call to get the JDBC driver loaded. It is instead sufficient to have the sajdbc4.jar file in the class file path and simply call DriverManager.getConnection() with a URL that begins with jdbc:sqlanywhere.

  The JDBC 4.0 driver contains manifest information to allow it to be loaded as an OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) bundle.

  With the JDBC 4.0 driver, metadata for NCHAR data now returns the column type as java.sql.Types.NCHAR, NVARCHAR, or LONGNVARCHAR. In addition, applications can now fetch NCHAR data using the Get/SetNString or Get/SetNClob methods instead of the Get/SetString and Get/SetClob methods.

• jConnect – This driver is a 100% pure Java driver. It communicates with SAP Sybase IQ using the TDS client/server protocol.

  jConnect and jConnect documentation are available at http://www.sybase.com/products/allproductsa-z/softwaredeveloperkit/jconnect.

When choosing which driver to use, you should consider the following factors:

• Features – The SQL Anywhere JDBC 4.0 driver and jConnect are JDBC 4.0 compliant. The SQL Anywhere JDBC driver provides fully-scrollable cursors when connected to an SAP Sybase IQ database. The jConnect JDBC driver provides scrollable cursors when connected to an SAP Sybase IQ database server, but the result set is cached on the client side. The jConnect JDBC driver provides fully-scrollable cursors when connected to an Adaptive Server Enterprise database.

  The JDBC 4.0 API documentation is available at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/index-jsp-136101.html.

• Pure Java – The jConnect driver is a pure Java solution. The SQL Anywhere JDBC drivers are based on the SQL Anywhere ODBC driver and are not pure Java solutions.
• Performance – The SQL Anywhere JDBC drivers provide better performance for most purposes than the jConnect driver.
• Compatibility – The TDS protocol used by the jConnect driver is shared with Adaptive Server Enterprise. Some aspects of the driver's behavior are governed by this protocol, and are configured to be compatible with Adaptive Server Enterprise.

For information about platform availability for the SQL Anywhere JDBC drivers and jConnect, see http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1061806.