One of the standard practices for closing the gap between the application and database is the use of a object-relational mapping tool or hand-crafted data access objects. These provide an excellent abstraction of the domain objects so that the developer doesn’t need to worry about all the complexities of mapping this to the database. However, we have found that this hides a large amount of useful information from the developer when they are trying to track down bugs or monitor performance issues.

With these problems in mind, Facdatum have created an open source JDBC monitoring framework. JDBC Tools provides a proxy JDBC driver that can be easily configured to sit between your application and the underlying database to allow you plug in components for monitoring different aspects of the database access.

JDBC Tools comes with some predefined components. Notably a jdbc logger component that will log all interaction with the database and a jdbc query plan explain tool that will generate query plans for each application query as the program is running. However, the real power comes from providing a simple API to allow others to plug in their own monitoring code. We can image a wide range of different uses that JDBC Tools could be applied to. To find out more, look at the JDBC Tools page.