How to open and close JDBC connections

12 January, 2022·134 words·1 min

Programming Databases

Author

Alejandro Duarte

Alejandro Duarte is a Software Engineer, published author, and award winner. He currently works for MariaDB plc as a Developer Relations Engineer. Starting his coding journey at 13 with BASIC on a rudimentary black screen, Alejandro quickly transitioned to C, C++, and Java during his academic years at the National University of Colombia. Relocating first to the UK and then to Finland, Alejandro deepened his involvement in the open-source community. He’s a recognized figure in Java circles, credited with articles and videos amassing millions of views, and presentations at international events.

To open and close database connections in Java, get a JDBC driver for your database. For example, in the case of MariaDB databases, you can add the following to the pom.xml file (or download the JAR and manually add it to your project if you are not using a tool like Maven):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.mariadb.jdbc</groupId>
    <artifactId>mariadb-java-client</artifactId>
    <version>LATEST</version>
</dependency>

Use a try-with-resources block to get a Connection object:

Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(
        "jdbc:mariadb://localhost:3306/database\_name",
        "user", "password"
);

If for some reason you cannot use a try-with-resources block, remember to close the connection, ideally in a finally block to guarantee that the connection is closed even if an exception is thrown: