JDBC Drivers

Besides setting up these file locations, you must also tell the Power*Architect about the JDBC drivers you wish to use. JDBC Drivers are needed to access most databases, and are distributed in "JAR file" format. Click on the "JDBC Drivers" tab and click Add... to specify the location of a JDBC driver jar file; if it is valid, the system will list the names of any Driver classes found in it, as shown below (note that "ojdbc" stands for Oracle's JDBC driver, whereas "ODBC" is Microsoft's technology for database access).

Note: The tie-in between Drivers and Connections might seem a bit indirect if you are not used to using Java JDBC. In this section of the User Preferences you are simply telling the Power*Architect to load these drivers into memory when it starts up. When you set up an actual Connection, you implicitly tell the software which driver to use by the second field of the "db URL" as described on page 21. If you need more information on JDBC drivers, please refer to the Basic Concepts section of this manual on page 3.