The Difference Between JDBC And JPA

2 min readFeb 5, 2023

This article will look at the differences between the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API and the Java Persistence API (JPA).

What Is JDBC?

JDBC is a programming-level interface for Java applications that communicate with a database. An application uses this API to communicate with a JDBC manager. It’s the standard API that our application code uses to communicate with the database. Beyond the API is the vendor-supplied, JDBC-compliant driver for the database we’re using.

Pros of JDBC

Simple SQL processing
Good performance with large data
Simple syntax so easy to learn
It is useful in applications where full control of the execution is required.

Cons of JDBC

Large programming overhead
There is no encapsulation
Hard to implement the MVC concept
Queries are DBMS specific

What Is JPA?

JPA is a Java standard that allows us to bind Java objects to records in a relational database. It’s one possible approach to Object Relationship Mapping(ORM), allowing the developer to retrieve, store, update, and delete data in a relational database using Java objects. Several implementations are available for the JPA specification.

Pros of JPA

Provides encapsulation which lets developers focus on business logic.
Integration with java beans validation for Easier Validations
Provides Database Independence
A single request manages all the SQL in a single transaction.

Cons of JPA

Not good for batch transactions. Consumes too much memory.
Not thread-safe.
A better understanding of what happens is required to specify additional fetches and improve performance.
JPA is 4x slower than JDBC when it comes to large-batch processing.
Mapping between database tables can be a bit challenging.

JPA vs JDBC

When it comes to deciding how to communicate with back-end database systems, software architects face a significant technological challenge. The debate between JPA and JDBC is often the deciding factor, as the two database technologies take very different approaches to working with persistent data.

Performance

The difference between JPA and JDBC is essentially who does the coding: the JPA framework or a local developer. Either way, we’ll have to deal with the object-relation impedance mismatch.

To be fair, when we write SQL queries incorrectly, JDBC performance can be abysmally sluggish. When deciding between the two technologies, performance shouldn’t be a point of dispute. Professional developers are more than capable of producing Java applications that run equally well regardless of the technology utilized.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored the key differences between JPA and JDBC.

While JPA brings many advantages, we have many other high-quality alternatives to use if JPA doesn’t work best for our current application requirements.

Sample Code for JDBC : https://github.com/rragul/product-jdbc

Sample Code for JPA : https://github.com/rragul/customer-jpa