JDBC providers specify the driver files that can be used to connect to a database. Select the menu “Setting | JDBC Provider…” to display the “Define JDBC Providers” dialog box.
Click the “Add” button to open the “New JDBC Provider” dialog box.
Enter the JDBC provider name, select the database driver type, and use the “Browse…” button to select the driver files. The database driver type is used to format the JDBC connection URL. For Oracle database, there are thin driver and OCI driver. You need to use OCI driver if you work with an Oracle 8 or 9i database that has CLOB columns holding more than 4000 characters.
As an example, to define an Oracle JDBC provider to connect to Oracle 8.1.7 databases using thin driver, you can enter “Oracle 8.1.7 JDBC Driver” as the JDBC provider name. Select the “Oracle (thin driver)” as database driver type. Then click the “Browse…” button to select driver files from the local hard drive.
Select “*.zip” in the “Files of type” drop-down list, and navigate to the proper directory to select “classes12.zip” and “nls_charset12.zip” files. Click the “Open” button to close the dialog box. The “New JDBC Provider” dialog box will be refreshed as the following.
Click the “OK” button to create the JDBC provider. The “Define JDBC Providers” dialog box will be refreshed with the new provider name.
You can define more JDBC providers to connect to other type of databases if needed. The following shows more providers defined for DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase SQL Anywhere, Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.