Hello Abby, please change your display name as Ernest asks you!
When you load the driver class with Class.forName("..."), the
JDBC driver registers itself with the DriverManager. By doing this, it tells the DriverManager which kind of JDBC URL this driver is for.
When you ask the DriverManager for a connection by calling getConnection(...), the DriverManager uses the JDBC URL that you supply to look in its registry of drivers, and picks a driver that can handle that URL.