I am very new to the EJB world and understand the basics. So please pardon me if I am not very clear in explaining my problem.

I am given an assignment where I need to read data from tables in one database(Informix) and write it to another database(Oracle). The data needs to be transferred once a day and lock contention is not an issue. Maximum data that can be copied is about 1000 rows per table.

My questions are:
1. Is there any pattern that addresses my case.
2. Should I write a Java program that uses direct JDBC calls or should I use EJB's?

Any thoughts/comments/opinions will be appreciated.
Jag

Hi Jag,
It is my very personal opinion. Having worked on projects involving both JDBC and EJBs I prefer to use JDBC calls to the probelm that you have described. My opinion is based on the following:
1. It is just a batch process running once a day.
2. There is little / no transaction isolation involved. I mean, any rollbacks or constraint violation.
3. The operation is just going to be INSERTS/ UPDATES on the table rather than a distributed transaction.

I would use EJBs for a transaction that involves a set of inserts/updates/deletes spanning over multiple tables or even multiple databases.

I would like to use less overhead on demand calls using JDBC for simple inserts/updates/deletes (which I presume is the problem you have described)
Last but not the least, get some more opinion of experts in this forum before yo jump into a conclusion.
Good Luck.
Sekar

With EJBs though, you get the transactions, and so what it gives you is the ability to do your entire batch process in a transaction, and then at the end, either every row from Informix made it to Oracle, or none did. Depending on your application, it may be a real pain if you get a failure halfway through and can't figure out which rows made it and which didn't. With EJB and transactions, you get all or nothing.

Dave

a simple JDBC proggy called once a day are more as enough for your use case.
tx are also supported by the databases you use even with JDBC. so there is no reason why u should use a fat EJB server with JTA/JTS...

cy