JDBC 4 is currently in Early Draft Review in the JCP (JSR 221). The proposed spec focuses on ease-of-use and programmer productivity, and defines support for SQL 2003 data types, including SQL's native XML type. A new Artima article describes the most important new features.

While prior JDBC versions focused on incremental improvements providing functionality to J2EE application servers, JDBC 4's key priority is to make it easier for developers to work directly with the JDBC API. Much of JDBC 4's ease-of-development features are a direct result of new capabilities available in J2SE 1.5.

JDBC 4 also introduces several SQL 2003 features, including a Java-specific mapping for the new XML SQL type, support for national character sets, and exposes to tools more information about the state of database connections and statements.

It's good to see the inclusion of fine grained exceptions in JDBC4. It's been a real benefit using the Spring Framework exception translation, and it seems JDBC4 will be good enough to replace it.

Kim Pepper

I would like to see better support for Array and Struct (database objects), and a cleaner way to access LOBS.

I'm glad to see the better XML and Connection Pool support.

Better LOB support is definitely a good thing. The query mapping mechanism proposed for JDBC 4.0 reminds me a lot of Spring's JDBC mapping facility.