Desperately looking for SAP DB JDBC driver
I am trying to connect Eclipse through Quantum DB perspective to a local instance of SAP DB. Eclipse is Java-based, so its plugin is JDBC-based. The docs online from SAP are missing one little thing: the name of the class that SAP uses for JDBC driver (that must be specified along the JDBC file name). I tried multiple variants Google had brought to me, until I saw in Database Manager GUI a new connection.
Unfortunately I can’t tell you the name. I’ve started this post as soon as I saw that connection, but I had to stop for about 12 hours, because I didn’t follow one of the basic rules in computer world - one change at a time. Setting Eclipse to use the new-fancy-beta JRE 1.5, adding Quantum to currently active Eclipse plugins and switching the darn class string was inconsistent: one of those fell so bad, that, though I’ve been pacient as hell, keeping Eclipse at 98% of CPU for about half hour was not enough. I had to kill Eclipse. Anyway Quantum didn’t fit into 3.0 version of Eclipse, so I should not have any big hopes. I didn’t found the missing link, but anyway I will not try this way anymore, since there is another way, through jdbc:odbc bridge, and since I have this nice SQL Studio (it looks almost as intuitive as management console for MS SQL Server 2000).
This reminded me another funny thing. Java has supported, as far as I remember, JNI, a way to insert fragments of native code into Java applications. Of course, the native stuff was not portable, so Java paradigm was broken by Sun in person. In the same way, soon after I learned about the final decision in Microsoft vs. Sun trial, I had found on Sun website an ActiveX-Java bridge, the kind of stuff that Sun used in order to prove Microsoft was breaking the rules of Java. Yesteday I’ve found there is a bridge jdbc:odbc provided by Sun, that does anything JDBC does; but, without any obvious reason, Sun advices the use of JDBC when possible…