So far, you have been interacting with the database directly. You have been submitting SQL statements to the database server (PostgreSQL) via the University network using DBeaver and viewing the results of executing those statements in DBeaver.

End-users know nothing about databases or SQL --- they will be using an application that is interacting with the database server behind the scenes. This week's lab is about showing you what is involved in creating an application that interacts with a database.

The database and the application will often be running on different computers --- this is what allows us to create multi-user systems that have many users all interacting with a shared database. In this case, the user's applications will be using a network to interact with the shared database. The database is usually referred to as a database server and the applications that interact with that database are referred to as a database clients. We will be working with a database client in this lab.

We will be comparing two different librairies for interacting with the database. The first (JDBC) is a low-level library that makes you do all of the work. The second (JDBI) takes care of a lot of the tedious plumbing code (code that moves data from one place to another) for you.