Accessing the Data: An Introduction to JDBC - Java Application Development on Linux - page 332

Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url, username, password);

Getting this to compile and run requires you to have the appropriate
JDBC JAR files available. For Oracle, see your Oracle DBA, or see pages
228-229 of Java Oracle Database Development by David Gallardo. For MySQL,
it's an easy download you can install from the Internet.

15.3.1
The JDBC implementation for MySQL is available for free from
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-jdbc.html .
The current version at the time of writing was mysql-connector-java-
3.0.9-stable.tar.gz which you can unpack as follows:

Downloading JDBC for MySQL

$ gunzip mysql-connector-java-3.0.9-stable.tar.gz
$ tar xvf mysql-connector-java-3.0.9-stable.tar

That leaves you with a directory named mysql-connector-java-
3.0.9-stable which contains a JAR file named mysql-connector-java-
3.0.9-stable-bin.jar along with some directories (which are the contents
of the JAR, unpacked) and a few miscellaneous files.
From the readme file:

Once you have unarchived the distribution archive, you can install the
driver in one of two ways:

• Either copy the com and org subdirectories and all of their contents
to anywhere you like, and put the directory holding the com and org
subdirectories in your classpath, or
• Put mysql-connector-java-3.0.9-stable-bin.jar in your class-
path, either by adding the full path to it to your CLASSPATH
environment variable, or putting it in $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext .

Unlike JUnit, it is OK to put this JAR in the ext directory.

15.4 Q UERYING D ATA

Back to our example. Do you remember the portion that built the query? Here
it is again: