First of all let me tell you what exactly is a database. A database is a collection of information (data) arranged in a sequential manner for enabling easy retrieval, updation and manipulation in one or other ways. The datas are generally arranged in rows and columns in a tabular form. A simple database can have 2 columns with several rows or can span upto thousands of rows and multiple columns in case of a complex database like Flight reservation database of an airline.

We come across databases in many form in our day to day life in offline as well as online world. As Internet is growing rapidly and many of the service provider are trying hard to provide their services to be rendered from the comfort of your home from your desktop or laptop, most of the web applications have been developed and the core of these application is database. Say for example you access your bank account details from Internet, where do you think these account details are saved? Yes they are saved in a database and when you enter the account number and password then the data relevant to your account is pulled up from the database and shown to you. There are various types of Database Management Systems available like Oracle, DB2, SQL server, My SQL etc.

The web applications are primarily developed on either Java or ASP.Net programming language. And their are specific methods like JDBC and ODBC to be used to let your programs (web applications) connect to the database and retrieve the appropriate information despite the type of database. All the database management system above understand a single language called SQL or structured Query Language.

While dealing with database driven applications it is very important to know about SQL and JDBC or ODBC depending upon the programming language you are using for the application development.

So what is SQL? SQL stands for Structure Query Language, a common programming language used to manipulate information in the database. Using different SQL queries data can be added to a databse or deleted from it and we can retrieve and show data depending upon our requirement using these SQL statements. Example of the simplest SQL query is

SELECT * from table_name

This will retrieve all data within a table.

Now let me give you a brief of What is JDBC. It stands for Java database Connectivity and it is the standard Application programming Interface that allows Java programs to talk to the Database Management System. As JDBC is a standard specification, a Java program that uses the JDBC API can connect to any database management system for which there is a JDBC driver.

What is ODBC? ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity and it is an interface to access database like Microsoft Access, Excel and dBase, DB2 etc through Call level Interface specification of the SQL access group. In the perspective of the end-user, ODBC is the best way of accessing information stored in another database without the need of understanding how it is done. In the perspective of the programmer, ODBC is a code that can make programming easy enough so it can access other databases in other software.

For ready reference on all database related knowledge you can visit Database Guides

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