New JDBC SQL/XML Features Improve XML Data Handling

he new version of the Java Database Connectivity API (JDBC 4) is getting a major face-lift with many great new features. Perhaps the most important update is the support for the XML data type, defined by the SQL 2003 standard. While storing XML in the database and having your application make updates to it isn't anything new, this is the first time that JDBC offers a mapping interface (java.sql.SQLXML) to support the SQL/XML database data type. Of course other interfaces, such as java.sql.Connection and java.sql.ResultSet, were updated as well to reflect this new addition.

Before the XML data type was introduced with the SQL 2003 standard, developers had to store XML as BLOB, CLOB, or TEXT types. Today, many database vendors already support the XML type as part of their products, but prior to JDBC 4, Java applications still had to do conversions between the XML data type on the database side and the types supported by JDBC. The new JDBC interfaces define Java native bindings for XML, thus making the handling of any database XML data easier and more efficient.