Introduction

With release 8.1.6 and higher, the Oracle JDBC drivers are compliant with the JDBC 2.0 specification. JDBC 2.0 functionality previously implemented through Oracle extensions in the oracle.jdbc2 package--such as structured objects, object references, arrays, and LOBs--is now implemented through the standard java.sql package in JDK 1.2.

If you are in a JDK 1.1.x environment, you can continue to use the oracle.jdbc2 package. With release 8.1.6 and higher, you can also use JDBC 2.0 features in connection objects, statement objects, result set objects, and database meta data objects under JDK 1.1.x by casting your objects to the Oracle types.

Furthermore, with release 8.1.6 and higher, you can use features of the JDBC 2.0 Optional Package (also known as the JDBC 2.0 Standard Extension API) under either JDK 1.2.x or JDK 1.1.x. These features, including connection pooling and distributed transactions, are supported through the standard javax.sql package. This package and the classes that implement its interfaces are now included with the JDBC classes ZIP file for either JDK 1.2.x or JDK 1.1.x.

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