Treffer: Creating and Configuring WebSphere Data Sources and JDBC Providers: Learn how to create and configure data sources and JDBC providers for your applications in IBM WebSphere Application Server 5.

This article describes how to create and configure data sources and JDBC providers for the applications in IBM WebSphere Application Server 5. A WebSphere application connects to a database using a data source. Each data source needs a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) Provider that specifies the Java class that provides the JDBC driver implementation. JDBC creates a database independent interface between a Java application and a database. JDBC offers a standardized API for database access. The JDBC API consists of a set of Java classes and interfaces for major database functions such as connecting to a database, running queries, processing results, and so on. Applications using JDBC can access any data source without knowing about the underlying driver implementations. A data source has several properties that have to be configured, such as name, JNDI name, and so on. This information is necessary for applications to locate the data source and make database connections. The following steps are required for WebSphere applications that require database access. The first step is to create a JDBC Provider. This specifies the JDBC driver implementation and the classes used to implement the data source to be used by the application. This step has to be done before creating the data source. And second step is to create a data source under a particular JDBC provider; in this step data source is created and configured the with database specific settings required for connection.