This was my original article on external database access, it was aimed at MySQL databases only. It describes where to get the driver, how to install it into your CLASSPATH, how to connect, and how to run both immediate and prepared SQL statements from RPG.

Here, I took my original MySQL code, and expanded it so you can load any JDBC driver you wish. All the same features as the previous article, but able to access any sort of database.

I added support for handling Null database values to the JDBCR4 service program, and described the new support in this article.

This article provided sample code written by Jon Juracich that demonstrates how to connect to and run SQL statements against a Microsoft SQL Server database from RPG. This uses Microsoft's JDBC driver (which I do not recommend) but the example of running SQL statements is still useful. (But see below.)

After handling many complaints/problems with Microsoft's SQL Server JDBC driver, a developer named Hugo Cantor gave me a great tip: Use the open source jTDS driver with SQL Server, it works better! This article explains where to get the jTDS driver and the (minor) changes that you need to make to Jon Juracich's example to make it work with the jTDS driver.

This article provided sample code written by Vincent Taquin that demonstrates how to connect to and run SQL statements against an Oracle database from RPG.

This article takes what I learned from the earlier articles and attempts to combine it all into one. It also adds support for result set meta-data and commitment control to the JDBCR4 service program.

While previous articles showed how to access database columns (fields) by number, this article adds support for retriving the column values by name instead.

Previous articles asked JDBC to convert all char/varchar columns to EBCDIC when reading it into an RPG program. This caused problems, especially for international users. This article adds Unicode support to JDBCR4, allowing support for any character in the Basic Multilingual Plane.