oracle jdbc driver version madness

java sql oracle jdbc ora-01722
Stroboskop picture Stroboskop · Apr 16, 2009 · Viewed 24.8k times · Source

Why the heck does Oracle offer a different(!) version of the JDBC driver, e.g. ojdbc14.jar, for every(!) database version?
The files all have different sizes and thus probably different content.

background:
We get a random and seemingly irreproducible error saying "invalid number" when saving data (we guess it's the Timestamp). But it's not any particular statement. Most of the time, it saves just fine. Just once a month a harmless looking statement will fail.

So i had a closer look at Oracle's download site and noticed that none of the filesizes match despite files sharing the same name.

Our product is run on databases maintained by our clients, i.e. whatever version and patch the clients have running is what it is.
So what driver do we use? The latest (Oracle 11g) - despite the fact that it's usually 9i and 10g databases?

Why don't they just link all versions to the same "one driver suits all" file?
Or are there minute differences leading to effects like our random errors?

EDIT: i was mistaken about the 9i databases.

Answer

Oliver Michels picture Oliver Michels · Apr 16, 2009

please see the compatibility matrix at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/jdbc-faq-090281.html#02_02

Also take in mind that the timestamp datatype is only available since Oracle 10.

Related questions

.nextval JDBC insert problem

I try to insert into table with sequence .nextval as primary key, the sql in Java is sql = "INSERT INTO USER (USER_PK, ACCOUNTNUMBER, FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, EMAIL ) VALUES (?,?,?,?,?)"; ps = conn.prepareStatement(sql); ps.setString(1, "User.nextval"); ps.setString(2, accountNumber); ps.…

Read More
Using setDate in PreparedStatement

In order to make our code more standard, we were asked to change all the places where we hardcoded our SQL variables to prepared statements and bind the variables instead. I am however facing a problem with the setDate(). Here …

Read More
JDBC returning empty result set

I'm using JDBC for very simple database connectivity. I have created my connection/statement and executed a query. I check the query object of the statement in the debugger to confirm that it is sending a proper query. I then …

Read More