.NET Development with JDBC

A Fortune 500 company had the need to access one of their enterprise databases from an existing .NET client application. ODBC drivers proved to not be feasible due to some critical performance bugs.

At first, the customer resisted the idea of introducing Java into their .NET environment. The following factors convinced the company to choose it over their initial concerns:

• The required Java Runtime Environment did not have to be installed separately but could be bundled with the application.
• Performance and feature completeness of the JDBC integration were comparable to that of a pure Java application.
• No database-specific code was needed in client application, reducing lock-in.
• The JDBC driver was already in widespread use in the company.

While we were initially almost excluded from the evaluation, the engineers ended up picking JDBC Courier as their preferred solution and management agreed after comparing the business aspects of the different proposed solutions.