JDBC Type 4 Driver Programmer's Reference for SQL/MX Release 3.2.1

Glossary
A
abstract class In Java, a class designed only as a parent from which subclasses can be derived, which is not
itself suitable for instantiation. An abstract class is often used to "abstract out" incomplete sets of
features, which can then be shared by a group of sibling subclasses that add different variations
of the missing pieces.
American National
Standards Institute
(ANSI)
The United States government body responsible for approving US standards in many areas,
including computers and communications. ANSI is a member of ISO. ANSI sells ANSI and ISO
(international) standards.
American
Standard Code for
Information
Interchange (ASCII)
The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. ASCII uses 7 bits for each
character. It does not include accented letters or any other letter forms not used in English (such
as the German sharp-S or the Norwegian ae-ligature). Compare to Unicode.
ANSI See American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
API See application program interface (API).
application
program
A software program written for or by a user for a specific purpose.1.
2. A computer program that performs a data processing function rather than a control function.
application
program interface
(API)
A set of functions or procedures that are called by an application program to communicate with
other software components.
ASCII See American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).
autocommit mode A mode in which a JDBC driver automatically commits a transaction without the programmer's
calling commit().
AWT See Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT).
B
base table A table that has physical existence: that is, a table stored in a file.
BLOB Short for Binary Large OBject, a collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a database
management system. These entities are primarily used to hold multimedia objects such as images,
videos, and sound. They can also be used to store programs or even fragments of code. A Java
Blob object (Java type, java.sql.Blob) corresponds to the SQL BLOB data type.
branded A Java virtual machine that Oracle has certified as conformant.
browser A program that allows you to read hypertext. The browser gives some means of viewing the
contents of nodes and of navigating from one node to another. Internet Explorer, Netscape
Navigator, NCSA Mosaic, Lynx, and W3 are examples for browsers for the WWW. They act
as clients to remote servers.
bytecode The code that javac, the Java compiler, produces.
C
catalog In SQL/MP and SQL/MX, a set of tables containing the descriptions of SQL objects such as
tables, views, columns, indexes, files, and partitions.
class path The directories where a Java virtual machine and other Java programs that are located in the
/usr/tandem/java/bin directory search for class libraries (such as classes.zip). You can set
the class path explicitly or with the CLASSPATH environment variable.
client A software process, hardware device, or combination of the two that requests services from a
server. Often, the client is a process residing on a programmable workstation and is the part of
a program that provides the user interface. The workstation client might also perform other portions
of the program logic. Also called a requester.
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