Follow these general steps to develop a data access application:
Decide how to implement data access.
You can access data in various ways:
With Web components
Create a JDBC provider and data source.
An application component uses a connection factory to access a connection instance, which the component then uses to connect to the underlying enterprise information system (EIS). A data source is associated with a JDBC provider that supplies the specific JDBC driver implementation class. The data source represents the JCA connection factory for the relational resource adapter. For more information, see Configure WebSphere Application Server - Express to access databases or Configuring Java 2 Connector connection factories.
Look up a data source or connection factory using a resource reference.
Using a resource reference to access your data source or connection factory is required when running in WebSphere Application Server - Express. For more information, see Looking up data sources with resource references for relational access.
Get a connection to a data source.
The connection management architecture for both relational and procedural access to enterprise information systems (EIS) is based on the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) specification. The Connection Manager (CM), which pools and manages connections within an application server, is capable of managing connections obtained through both resource adapters (RAs) defined by the JCA specification, and DataSources defined by the JDBC 2.0 Extensions Specification.