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I believe there are different flavors of this questions already asked, but I wanted to confirm this again as we are very close to our release and wanted to validate with the community

We have been using Oracle10g and java 1.5 for quite some time now with ojdbc14.jar. I know that ojbc14.jar is catered towards java 1.4. But thankfully we never saw any issue while using this with 1.5 version. Another reason for not moving to ojbc5 was the fact that we did not see ojdbc5.jar in the installed oracle 10g at all.

We have upgraded our DB to be 11g now and I did not see ojdbc14.jar. Does this mean we have to move to ojdbc5.jar?

We are willing to make the change. But can the people who made the switch confirm if they saw any issue when they changed the JDBC driver to ojdbc5.jar from ojdbc14.jar

Related to it, it would be good if someone can elaborate little more about dms flavors of this jar and how it is to be used.

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3 Answers 3

up vote 9 down vote accepted

ojbc14 should work just fine with Oracle11g. The primary differences between ojbc14 and later versions is the later version support newer versions of the JDBC API, as well as new features of the newer versions of oracle.

If your application gets along with ojbc14 as it is, there's little reason to upgrade the driver, other than the fact that it's always a good idea to try and track new revisions as they come along, to keep your system current.

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Thanks. Our management is keen on the upgrade. Any idea if we would need a code change to support the new jdbc driver? –  Fazal Dec 6 '10 at 18:35
@Fazal: No, none should be required. A thorough re-testing is advisable, though. –  skaffman Dec 6 '10 at 18:37

Take a look at Oracle's JDBC drivers list. For 11g and 11g2, only ojdbc5.jar and ojdbc6.jar are listed. This could mean that only they are officially supported, so if you have problems with ojdbc14.jar, Oracle probably won't help you.

If Oracle's support is important for your management, I'd recommend upgrading to ojdbc5.jar.

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Thanks. I would rather go to something which is supported officially, even though we may not see a problem. –  Fazal Dec 6 '10 at 23:08

Below are the suggestions from Oracle http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/jdbc-faq-090281.html#08_01

the 11.1 drivers by default convert SQL DATE to Timestamp when reading from the database. This always was the right thing to do and the change in 9i was a mistake. The 11.1 drivers have reverted to the correct behavior. Even if you didn't set V8Compatible in your application you shouldn't see any difference in behavior in most cases. You may notice a difference if you use getObject to read a DATE column. The result will be a Timestamp rather than a Date. Since Timestamp is a subclass of Date this generally isn't a problem. Where you might notice a difference is if you relied on the conversion from DATE to Date to truncate the time component or if you do toString on the value. Otherwise the change should be transparent.

If for some reason your app is very sensitive to this change and you simply must have the 9i-10g behavior, there is a connection property you can set. Set mapDateToTimestamp to false and the driver will revert to the default 9i-10g behavior and map DATE to Date.

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