Type 3 vs Type 4 Drivers

[Aleena Rehman]

Dear JDBC Gurus,

Can somebody please explain what are the benefits of Type-3 driver over Type-4 driver ? I was having a discussion with one of our customers and he was considering the gateway(MiddleWare) in Type-3 as an additional layer of security, as clients donot talk directly to the db server ?

I am looking for some counter argument and if possible some reference material that can help ?

[edited out e-mail: ]http://faq.javaranch.com/view?UseTheForumNotEmail]
[ February 11, 2007: Message edited by: Jeanne Boyarsky ]

[Scott Selikoff]

With the risk of being flamed, I find Wikipedia has a decent discussion of the driver levels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDBC_type_3_driver

I tend to not worry about the level unless there's a problem with a specific driver. All and all I think the only database it mattered was with oracle and the performance differences were almost non-existent.

[Aleena Rehman]

Scott,
Thanks for your response, however it probably does not answer my question. I have already gone through Wikipedia's definition of Type-3, but my question is weather type-3 is more/less secure. Does it in any way affect security ?

Regards,

[Philip Shanks]

I see little difference from a security perspective. The primary difference is whether the generic JDBC call is translated to the vendor specific call on the client or on the server. The client, server and data stream are all equally vulnerable in either case.

I think that the layered security approach will be the same regardless of which JDBC driver type is chosen. You will want to limit which clients the DB server will accept connections from, use encrypted connections wherever possible, adequate authentication and strong access policies.