Due to binary licences , the Oracle driver is not present in the maven central repository. You can find some public repos that have hosted this jar to be made available for use but it is illegal as per the license.
it is obviously finding the jar file and downloading it as it is in my .m2 folder
There can be reasons why that jar is there ( or atleast you think it is )
- Whenever maven fails to find some jar ( due to any reason whatsoever ) , it does generate the maven2 hierarchy of folders in the .m2/ but if you look closely you will notice that its not exactly a jar , but its extension will be like "someJarName.1.1.1.jar.lastUpdated". This is not a jar, this is just a convention used by maven to keep track of what jars it needs to re-download and re-check
- The second possibility is that the jar must have been manually inserted into the repository ( by the mvn
install:install-file
command and that is the reason its there. of-course I am assuming the fact that you haven't configured any other repository besides the default mvn central
If you have the jar file in your local m2 repo ( I suggest you verify by expanding it, making sure all its package contents are in order and also the size of the jar ) then you may have to tell Eclipse to look for the jar again. To do this goto Window -> Preferences -> Maven -> User settings -> hit the re-index button and wait for a couple of minutes . And then see if this helps solve your problem
Edit
Another possible solution would be to use the system
scope and specify the path of the jar on the local machine , although I highly discourage this.