Postgres JDBC connection in Eclipse Help

Question

I'm trying to get a postgres jdbc connection working in eclipse. It would be nice to use the Data Source Explorer, but for now I'm just trying to get a basic connection. What I have done so far is download the postgres JDBC connector. I then tried two different things. First, Preferences-> Data Management, I tried to add the postgres connector. Second, I added the jar to my project and tried to load the driver using Class.forName("org.postgresql.Driver"); but neither worked. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks, Charlie

Answer 1

This is how I have made a connection: (I do not know if this is "best practice", but it works.)

Importing the driver:

1. Right click on your project
2. Choose property
3. Choose Java build path
4. Choose Add external JARS.. and select the location to the JDBC driver.

Here is my code:

try{
    Class.forName("org.postgresql.Driver");
    } catch (ClassNotFoundException cnfe){
      System.out.println("Could not find the JDBC driver!");
      System.exit(1);
    }
Connection conn = null;
try {
    conn = DriverManager.getConnection
                   (String url, String user, String password);
     } catch (SQLException sqle) {
       System.out.println("Could not connect");
       System.exit(1);
     }

The url can be of one of the following formats:

jdbc:postgresql:database
jdbc:postgresql://host/database
jdbc:postgresql://host:port/database

Answer 2

I was also having this problem as well and Vjeux's answer helped point me in the right direction.

I have a local copy of Tomcat6 that was installed and is managed by Eclipse. It was installed into '$HOME/bin/tomcat6'. To get the PostgreSQL JDBC driver working I simply copied my postgresql.jar file into the '$HOME/bin/tomcat6/lib' directory.

Also, if you don't know where to get the driver from in the first place, try this. I'm running Ubuntu so I ran 'sudo apt-get install libpg-java' which installed the driver into '/usr/share/java/postgresql.jar' and so I just copied it from there.