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Application Component Providers use the JDBC 2.0 API for accessing relational databases to manage persistent data for their applications. The JDBC API has two parts: a client API for direct use by developers to access relational databases and a standard contract between J2EE servers and JDBC drivers for supporting connection pooling and transactions. The latter contract is not directly used by the developers, it is used by J2EE server vendors to automatically provide pooling and transaction services to J2EE components.
An Application Component Provider uses the JDBC client-level API to get a database connection, to retrieve database records, to execute queries and stored procedures and to perform other database functions. Even though the JDBC API is quite simple, an Application Component Provider still experiences a learning curve and intensive programming effort due to differences between relational and object-oriented methodologies.