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Has anyone looked into extracting the jdbc-odbc bridge from an earlier and using it with JRE8 ?

  • Is it practical / possible to update / improve it to work with Java 8 ?
  • Would it be legal ?
assylias
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Doug Gillespie
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    It’s most probably neither, legal nor practical, as that’s the reason why it’s not being maintained anymore. Everyone who tried the MS Office drivers in 64 Bit environments will be happy getting rid of it. Have you tried a genuine JDBC driver for your database? What are you missing? – Holger May 21 '15 at 17:46
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    I've now taken a look at the source code available at http://jdk-source-code.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/jdk5.0_src/j2se/src/share/classes/sun/jdbc/odbc/ and it IS possible to rebuild and to get it working well enough for my own application by adding functions for some extended interfaces and killing a lot of multi character-set support. I'm very concerned abot legality though ! – Doug Gillespie May 22 '15 at 11:45
  • @Doug - it'd probably be hard for programmers here to answer your question in regards to legality. As far as I can tell, [this](http://jdk-source-code.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/jdk5.0_src/JavaResearchLicense.txt) is the license provided with the source link you've given us. Unfortunately, it's likely you'd need to get a lawyer to tell you whether it's legal or not. It'd probably depend on what you're doing with it (e.g. selling it). FWIW, I did find this text in the license: `COMMERCIAL USE AND DISTRIBUTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND MODIFICATIONS IS PERMITTED ONLY UNDER A SUN COMMERCIAL LICENSE.` – transistor1 Sep 29 '15 at 19:10
  • Legality aside, the process for copying the JDBC-ODBC components from Java 7 into Java 8 is described in another answer [here](http://stackoverflow.com/a/32825016/2144390). – Gord Thompson Sep 29 '15 at 20:25
  • You can use jdbc odbc classes from jre7 also in jre8 - see http://stackoverflow.com/a/34617075/2110961 – Frank M. Jan 11 '16 at 15:06
  • As @GordThompson noted it can be done, but for me it wasn't the solution in the end as the bridge does not support UTF-8: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-6345277 – Jaroslav Záruba Oct 29 '18 at 19:58

2 Answers2

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While this doesn't exactly answer your question, I was hunting for a free JDBC driver for Access, and found UCanAccess. I had success with this particular driver as a replacement while using SquirrelSQL with Access. Seeing as how your question is tagged , perhaps this might be an acceptable replacement for you.

transistor1
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Questions of this portation's legality aside, Sun's and Oracle's official positions have long been that --

the [JVM-bundled] JDBC-ODBC Bridge should be considered a transitional solution [...] Oracle does not support the JDBC-ODBC Bridge.

However, my employer, OpenLink Software, has produced enterprise-grade commercial Type 1 Bridges between JDBC and ODBC since Java 1.0, and these are fully compatible with the current Java 8 and any ODBC standard-compliant driver, including Microsoft's ODBC driver for Access. You can learn more here --

TallTed
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