This section describes the general functionality supported by the driver.

  • Unicode support: Multilingual JDBC applications can be developed on any operating system using the driver to access both Unicode and non-Unicode enabled databases. Internally, Java applications use UTF-16 Unicode encoding for string data. When fetching data, the driver automatically performs the conversion from the character encoding used by the database to UTF-16. Similarly, when inserting or updating data in the database, the driver automatically converts UTF-16 encoding to the character encoding used by the database.

    The JDBC API provides mechanisms for retrieving and storing character data encoded as Unicode (UTF-16) or ASCII. Additionally, the Java String object contains methods for converting UTF-16 encoding of string data to or from many popular character encodings.

  • Isolation and lock levels: Because transactions are not supported, the driver supports only the isolation level 0 (read uncommitted).
  • Error handling: The driver reports errors to the application by throwing SQLExceptions. Each SQLException contains the following information:
    • Description of the probable cause of the error, prefixed by the component that generated the error
    • Native error code (if applicable)
    • String containing the XOPEN SQLstate