Live from the JavaOne conference again, this time attending a session about enhancements to the JDBC specification 4.1. Four members of the JDBC specification team have presented a number of useful enhancements due in the upcoming version of JDBC. Some of these features may not make it into 4.1, but will be in future versions of JDBC down the road.

1. Named Prepared Statements
As many of you may already know, Prepared Statements support parameters referenced by numeric index such as ps.setString(1,”val1″) where “1” corresponds to the 1st index of “?” in the SQL string. Perhaps rightfully so, a lot of new developers to JDBC often complain that JDBC should support named parameters as well as numeric indexes. Well those developers are in luck, future versions of JDBC may support syntax such as the following:

NamedPStatement nsmt = con.createNPStatement("SELECT f1, f2, f3 FROM foo 
     WHERE f1 = :f1 AND f2 < :f2");
nstmt.setParameter("f1","val1");
nstmt.setParameter("f2","val2");
ResultSet rs = nstmt.executeQuery();

A quick screenshot of the slide covering this information:

2. Chaining Commands
Using the previous example, the team intends to support chaining commands such that setParameter() returns a reference to the object allowing single-lined commands such as the following.

ResultSet rs = nstmt.setParameter("f1","val1").setParameter("f2","val2").executeQuery()

3. Changing schemas on the fly
For databases that support the notion of database schemas, you will be able to change your current schema dynamically after the connection is established, using the following command:

Connection connection = ...
connection.setSchema("mySchema")

For those databases that do not support such commands, this would likely be a no-op.

4. Timezone support
Better support for time zones are due in distant future versions after Java 1.7 adds a lot of new features related to them.

More information from their slide: