Oracle-L: RE: Differences between Oracle JDBC thin and thick drivers

From: Ben Poels <poelsb_at_post.queensu.ca>
Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 13:03:27 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.0043FF45.20020409130327@fatcity.com>

I believe the difference is that the OCI drivers use SQL*Net or NET8 or whatever they call it now, whereas the thin driver does not require SQL*Net on the client machine.

Ben Poels
Sr. Technical Analyst
Queen's University

-----Original Message-----
Avrami
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 4:29 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Hello all,

I have a question concerning the Oracle JDBC thin vs. thick drivers and how they might affect operations from an application perspective.

We're in a Solais 8/Oracle 8.1.7.2 environment. We have several applications on several servers connecting to the Oracle database.

For redundancy, we're looking into setting up TAF (transparent application failover). Currently, some of our apps use the Oracle JDBC thin drivers to talk to the database, with a connection string that like this:

jdbc:oracle:thin:@host:port:ORACLE_SID

In a disaster recovery mode, where we would switch the database from one server to another, the host name in the above string would become invalid. That means we have to shut down our application servers and restart them with an updated string.

Using the Oracle OCI (thick) driver though, allows us to connect to a Net8 service instead of a specific server:

jdbc:oracle:oci8:@NET8_SERVICE_NAME

Coupled with the FAILOVER=ON option configured in Net8, it is then possible to direct a connection from the first server to the failover database on another server. This is exactly what we would like to do.

My question is, from an application perspective, how is the Oracle thick driver different from the thin driver? If everything else is "equal" (i.e. the thick driver is compatible with the app servers) would there be something within the the thick/OCI driver that could limit functionality vs. the thin driver?

My understand, which obviously is sketchy, is that the thick driver is a superset of the thin driver. If this is the case, and for example if all database connections were handled through a configuration file with the above OCI connection string, then theoretically the thick driver should work.

If anyone has any info on this that they can share, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Lou Avrami

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Author: Louis Avrami
INET: avramil_at_concentric.net

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Author: Ben Poels
INET: poelsb_at_post.queensu.ca

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