On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> Well, I assume they reimplemented libpq so that java would not rely on a
> platform-specific library like libpq.
yes, that is correct. jdbc for postgres is a complete implementation
of the client side protocol. this has some good and bad points -- on
the good side you have some features libpq is only about to get, like
row level result processing, but on them minus side you are missing
some features libpq has, like gssapi authentication (but you can still
get that with jdbc->odbc bridge).
but generally speaking jdbc is displacing odbc as the 'go to' library
for connection between different kinds of database systems, especially
on non-windows environments. jdbc is to java as fdw is to postgres
basically. so a fdw exposed jdbc driver should be able to connect and
gather data from just about anything -- even something like sql server
so that you could bypass the freetds dependency which is quite nice.
there's an odbc-fdw project that does something pretty similar and
might be a more natural choice for windows coders.
merlin