How to use SQL Server Compact Edition (CE) from Java?

Question

I want to access Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition databases from Java. How can I do that? I searched for JDBC driver for SQLCE, but I didn't find any.

Answer 1

According to a newsgroup post sent this Tuesday (2008-12-09) by Jimmy Wu@Mircrosoft:

The Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver does not support connecting to SQL Server Compact. At this time there isn't a scheduled JDBC support for SQL Server Compact edition. Thank-you for your continuing support of SQL Server.

Sincerely, Jimmy Wu

Answer 2

According to MSDN, there isn't one and there aren't any plans neither.

Answer 3

While I'm not familiar with SQL Server CE, I presume that MS provides an ODBC driver for it. Although it is not recommended for production use, you can use the JDBC-ODBC bridge to make your connection.

Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver"); 
Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:odbc:<yourODBC_DSN>"); 

To reiterate, the JDBC-ODBC Bridge driver provided with JDBC is recommended only for development and testing, or when no other alternative is available.