22 FileMaker ODBC and JDBC Guide
About the JDBC client driver
The JDBC client driver provides partial support for the JDBC 3.0 specification. The following features are
not supported by FileMaker:
1 Savepoint support
1 Retrieval of auto-generated keys
1 Passing parameters to a callable statement object by name
1 Holdable cursor support
1 Making internal updates to the data in Blob and Clob objects
1 Retrieving and updating the object referenced by a Ref object
1 Updating of columns containing BLOB, CLOB, ARRAY and REF data types
1 Boolean data type
1 DATALINK data type
1 Transform groups and type mapping
1 Relationship between the JDBC SPI and the Connector architecture
For additional details, see www.filemaker.com/support/technologies. Also see the SequeLink Developer’s
Reference available at www.datadirect.com for information about JDBC compatibility and developing
JDBC applications for SequeLink.
The JDBC client driver has been tested against the Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.4 and 1.5. It is a Type 4
driver — a native protocol, pure Java driver that converts JDBC calls directly into the network protocol used
by FileMaker. This type of driver offers all the advantages of Java including automatic installation (for
example, downloading the JDBC driver with an applet that uses it). The driver works with JDK 1.3 and
Java
2 as long as you only use JDBC 1.2 calls in a Java 2 environment.
The driver class and main entry point for the driver is named:
com.ddtek.jdbc.sequelink.SequeLinkDriver
Important The JDBC client driver replaces the FileMaker JDBC driver released with a previous version of
FileMaker. If you have previously set up access to a FileMaker data source using the older driver, you’ll
need to re-define access by using and configuring the new driver.
Using a JDBC URL to connect to your database
In Java, most resources are accessed through URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). A JDBC URL is used to
identify the database so the JDBC client driver can recognize and establish a connection with the database.
The JDBC URL consists of three main parts separated by colons:
jdbc:<subprotocol>:<subname>
The first part in the JDBC URL is always the JDBC protocol (“jdbc”). The subprotocol is the driver name or
the mechanism that supports multiple drivers. For the JDBC client driver, the subprotocol is
sequelink.
The subname is the IP address of the machine that is hosting the FileMaker data source.
