So recently I’ve decided to delve into the world of Java development, or, more specifically, desktop Java development. So far I am liking it. My first task was to write a small application that would accept two dates as input and spit out a tab-separated report of first and last journal entries in a system, broken down by each day. Turned out to be a good learning experience, and useful to my bosses. :)

So if you’ve ever wanted to know how to connect to and use a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 box in Java, perhaps you will find this useful. First thing to do? Download the Microsoft JDBC Type 4 driver here. You don’t need the setup program, just the JAR files. So extract those to a location you can remember.

Now for my development I am using NetBeans 5.5. I highly recommend this product. Not only does it ROCK, but it is FREE! To get SQL 2000 working in your Java app you will need to add the SQL 2000 JAR files into your project classpath settings in NetBeans. Once you have done this, here is how you can connect to and read records from a table in Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

DriverManager.registerDriver(new SQLServerDriver());
Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:microsoft:sqlserver://localhost:1433;databaseName=MyDb", "userName", "password");

PreparedStatement qry = connection.prepareStatement("SELECT * FROM myTable");
ResultSet table = qry.executeQuery();

while (table.next()) {
   someValue1 = table.getString("someColumn1");
   someValue2 = table.getDate("someColumn2");
}

table.close();
qry.close();
connection.close();

Obviously you will need to import the correct packages and such, but you get the idea.