We’re very happy to announce a guest post by Marco Behler, who has been blogging about jOOQ in the past.

Marco started out in programming (reverse-engineering, actually) and now mainly programmes on the JVM in his day-to-day work. He also always had a sweet tooth for strategy and marketing. Marco Behler GmbH is the result of that hybrid role.

It is all about the JDBC Basics

It is one of the days.

You are reading the Spring documentation’s @Transactional section and still don’t understand the difference between logical and physical transaction scopes. Simultaneously your app throws an

LazyInitializationException and you have no idea why. To top it off you see spontaneous database deadlocks in production and you suspect your connection pool is leaking connections..somehow.

Know what most likely would have helped instead of banging your head against the wall? Spending a couple (literally) of hours on learning the JDBC basics. Let’s find out why:

What are the JDBC basics?

The basics are opening up/closing database connections and then working with transactions. Also understanding how deadlocks, pessimistic and optimistic locking work on a plain JDBC level. A bit of isolation levels and savepoints and then directly on to connection pools and jdbc driver logging. That’s it. Seriously.

Why are the basics so important?

Everything you will encounter in frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, jOOQ etc. builds up on these basics. For example, there are a gazillion topics on the internet regarding Hibernate’s LazyInitializationException and I was scared of that particular exception myself many years ago. But what else would you expect trying to query the database without having a connection to the database open (which is basically all that this exeception is) ?

The same with Spring’s “transaction framework”. There is so much content, or shall we say (F)ear/(U)ncertainty/(D)oubt, out there on how to open up transactions with spring, be it programmatically, with annotations or xml. But what if you knew that under the hood, there is only one way (and actually one line of code) to open up transactions in the JDBC world?

Let me not even get started on the various (mis)configurations of connection pools you see in production in the wild. Or the unawareness of JDBC (driver) logging, which usually leads to debugging in the wild. All basics, which you can master in a couple of hours and which will help you for a lifetime!

Why do people not just learn the basics?

In every middle-sized project there is a ton of technologies involved and there usually is no clear-cut path on how to learn all of them or how they all work together. It simply takes a lot of time and effort to dig through everything.

There’s JPA sessions and JDBC connections and then Spring somehow provides those transactional proxies in 5 different ways and then some other colleague just put jOOQ into the mix, but then somehow my session doesn’t flush and my objects don’t get persisted and the HibernateTransactionManager is not working as expected.

With all of this, I would also hope for my database transactions just to commit – god forbid what happens on rollback :)

But in the end, everything technology mentioned is just a layer on top of JDBC. If you understand transactions or deadlocks or savepoints on the basic level, then Spring or Hibernate or jOOQ will not throw you off.

So what do you recommend ?

If you want to get miles ahead in your day-to-day database programming, you have to start with the basics. Step-by-Step. And then you will see most of your problems automatically evaporate.

Out of my extensive database programming experience, I created an ebook with a ton of ready-to-run exercises, which will take you from Java database novice to expert. At your own pace. You can literally copy the source code of every chapter into your IDE, run it and (hopefully) learn from it. It covers plain JDBC, Spring, Hibernate, jOOQ (soon) and also distributed transactions.

You can read the whole book for free online here, and I would love to get your feedback! I would really like to let the community feedback flow back into future editions of the book. In addition, If you like what you see and the exercises help you, you can also show your support by getting a paid digital version (pdf, epub, mobi).

In any case…

…learn your JDBC basics – and you will profit from them for a lifetime!