Root of the hierarchy of data access exceptions discussed in Expert One-On-One J2EE Design and Development . Please see Chapter 9 of this book for detailed discussion of the motivation for this package.

This exception hierarchy aims to let user code find and handle the kind of error encountered without knowing the details of the particular data access API in use (e.g. JDBC). Thus it is possible to react to an optimistic locking failure without knowing that JDBC is being used.

As this class is a runtime exception, there is no need for user code to catch it or subclasses if any error is to be considered fatal (the usual case).