Suggested JDBC books

Question

I'm working in a medium-ish sized development group working on multiple projects and am looking to find good JDBC books for the team. Most of the developers already know the basics of JDBC, but are looking to learn best practices and more advanced topics.

Topics might include:

1. Advanced trips and tricks
2. Patterns, and things that allow for later complexity
3. Database fail over (where the client program transparently switches)
4. Cross platform (linux and windows) issues
5. Long standing client connections
6. Stored procedures
7. ORM/DAO/hibernate
8. Postgres specific JDBC work (custom objects and what not)

Thats really a lot of ground there, but I'm looking for multiple books. What do you suggest?

Answer 1

Java Persistence with Hibernate is a good source on Hibernate.

Answer 2

The Java Transaction Pocessing book does a great job of covering transactions within JDBC itself and across multiple resources via the JTA. Its the only text I know of that explores this critical area in real detail.

Answer 3

You definitely need more than one book. The following books were helpful for me:

1. Martin Fowler. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture: This is a very high level book about enterprise patterns with a strong focus on database abstraction. No concrete examples for either Java or JDBC, but very strong on patterns
2. Art Taylor. Database Programming with J2EE. This is the opposite. Mostly low-level description of the JDBC API and some design patterns for Database (mostly DAO)
3. Christian Bauer and Gavin King. _Java Persistence with Hibernate _ for Hibernate Details.

In addition, I would recommend abstraction frameworks for database access (i.e. Spring framework or iBatis).

Spring can be integrated in existing projects, but is not highly recommended, since it is meant as a basic configuration and abstraction framework. IBatis integrates well in existing projects an can replace low-level/home-grown jdbc programming.

Recommended Books for Spring are everything with Rod Johnson as author (although they might be a abit outdated, they are usually very well written and go beyond explaining the api). The spring documentation is also extremely well written.