Setting up maven dependency for SQL Server

Question

Download the driver JAR from the link provided by Olaf and add it to your local Maven repository with;

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=sqljdbc4.jar -DgroupId=com.microsoft.sqlserver -DartifactId=sqljdbc4 -Dversion=4.0 -Dpackaging=jar

Then add it to your project with;

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.microsoft.sqlserver</groupId>
  <artifactId>sqljdbc4</artifactId>
  <version>4.0</version>
</dependency>

Answer for the "new" and "cool" Microsoft.

Yay, SQL Server driver now under MIT license on

• GitHub: https://github.com/Microsoft/mssql-jdbc
• Maven Central: http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Cmssql-jdbc

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.microsoft.sqlserver</groupId>
    <artifactId>mssql-jdbc</artifactId>
    <version>6.1.0.jre8</version>
</dependency>

Answer for the "old" Microsoft:

For my use-case (integration testing) it was sufficient to use a system scope for the JDBC driver's dependency as such:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.microsoft.sqlserver</groupId>
    <artifactId>sqljdbc4</artifactId>
    <version>3.0</version>
    <scope>system</scope>
    <systemPath>${basedir}/lib/sqljdbc4.jar</systemPath>
    <optional>true</optional>
</dependency>

That way, I could put the JDBC driver into local version control. No need to have each developer manually set stuff up in their own repositories.

I took inspiration from this answer to another Stack Overflow question and I've also blogged about it here.

There is also an alternative: you could use the open-source jTDS driver for MS-SQL Server, which is compatible although not made by Microsoft. For that driver, there is a maven artifact that you can use:

http://jtds.sourceforge.net/

From http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/net.sourceforge.jtds/jtds :

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sourceforge.jtds</groupId>
    <artifactId>jtds</artifactId>
    <version>1.3.1</version>
</dependency>

UPDATE nov 2016, Microsoft now published its MSSQL JDBC driver on github and it's also available on maven now:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.microsoft.sqlserver</groupId>
    <artifactId>mssql-jdbc</artifactId>
    <version>6.1.0.jre8</version>
</dependency>

I believe you are looking for the Microsoft SQL Server JDBC driver: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/aa937724

Be careful with the answers above. sqljdbc4.jar is not distributed with under a public license which is why it is difficult to include it in a jar for runtime and distribution. See my answer below for more details and a much better solution. Your life will become much easier as mine did once I found this answer.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/30111956/3368958