Microsoft releases a brand-new JDBC driver

Today I was looking back through TheServerSide for news items that caught my eye and came across this one: Microsoft releases a new JDBC Driver for SQL Server. If you think Microsoft took a hard look at itself and decided it wasn’t right to have a bad JDBC driver for its own product, you’d be mistaken. The new driver will work with SQL Server 2000, but the main reason for releasing the first beta is the planned release of SQL Server 2005.

With that in mind, let me quote a little from Susan Kuchinskas’s article SQL Server, Meet Java.

The JDBC Driver is available as a free download to SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 users, and Microsoft asked the Java community to test and give feedback on the product.

Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server, said the driver was part of Microsoft’s efforts to ensure interoperability with non-Windows applications.

We want to support interoperability with both Microsoft developers and Java developers. With this driver, no matter what development tool you use, you can put data in and get it out of SQL Server 2005.

Such interoperability also could increase the market for Microsoft’s database technology. “It extends the number of people and applications that can use [SQL Server 2005],” Rizzo said. “It makes our universe open to all developers, effectively.”

We’ll see what Microsoft really has in mind for us. We can only hope that this JDBC driver doesn’t end up
 like the previous one.