Overview of RowSet Objects

JDBC Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Oracle - Reference Implementation of JdbcRowSet

∟Overview of RowSet Objects

This section provides overview information on RowSet interface and its implementations.

RowSet is a new concept introduced in the JDBC specification. A RowSet object is designed to represent a container of tabular data from any data source. A RowSet object may obtain data from a database server through a JDBC driver, it may also obtain data from a spreadsheet, a flat file, or an XML document.

A RowSet object extends the ResultSet interface, so that it has ResultSet methods to retrieve column values or update rows back to the data source.

A RowSet object is also a JavaBeans component. It is designed to combine functionalities of Connect, Statement and ResultSet objects into a single object.

There 5 standard implementations of RowSet interface:

JdbcRowSet - A connected RowSet that is always connected to a database through a JDBC driver.
CachedRowSet - A disconnected RowSet that is not connected to the data source except when reading data from it or writing data to it.
WebRowSet - A disconnected RowSet extended from CachedRowSet. It can write itself as an XML document and read it back.
FilteredRowSet - A disconnected RowSet extended from WebRowSet. It can have filtering criteria to select data without using query statements.
JoinRowSet - A disconnected RowSet extended from WebRowSet. It can perform query join functions.

Sun has developed reference implementations of all 5 types or RowSet objects. But they are not included in standard JDK packages. They are packaged under com.sun.rowset. You need to down them separately. See the next tutorial for details.