George Watson of the
Stoker Group, Boulder
gave an overview of JDBC, Java's relational database
access package. See
http://splash.javasoft.com/jdbc/.
The presentation punctuated the good news of vendor-independent
database access with numerous examples of vendor-specific
behavior, which might trap the unweary. George concluded
with a demonstration that challenged the conventional model
of programming: a Java framework that loaded both its code
and data from a single database, using a custom ClassLoader
to fetch .class files from a database on demand.