Choosing an Approach for JDBC Database Access

You can choose among several approaches to form the basis for your JDBC database access. In addition to three flavors of JdbcTemplate, a new SimpleJdbcInsert and SimpleJdbcCall approach optimizes database metadata, and the RDBMS Object style takes a more object-oriented approach similar to that of JDO Query design. Once you start using one of these approaches, you can still mix and match to include a feature from a different approach. All approaches require a JDBC 2.0-compliant driver, and some advanced features require a JDBC 3.0 driver.

  • JdbcTemplate is the classic and most popular Spring JDBC approach. This “lowest-level” approach and all others use a JdbcTemplate under the covers.

  • NamedParameterJdbcTemplate wraps a JdbcTemplate to provide named parameters instead of the traditional JDBC ? placeholders. This approach provides better documentation and ease of use when you have multiple parameters for an SQL statement.

  • SimpleJdbcInsert and SimpleJdbcCall optimize database metadata to limit the amount of necessary configuration. This approach simplifies coding so that you need to provide only the name of the table or procedure and provide a map of parameters matching the column names. This works only if the database provides adequate metadata. If the database does not provide this metadata, you have to provide explicit configuration of the parameters.

  • RDBMS objects — including MappingSqlQuery, SqlUpdate, and StoredProcedure — require you to create reusable and thread-safe objects during initialization of your data-access layer. This approach is modeled after JDO Query, wherein you define your query string, declare parameters, and compile the query. Once you do that, execute(…​), update(…​), and findObject(…​) methods can be called multiple times with various parameter values.