How to Connect to MySQL database in Java with Example

In this tutorial, You will learn how to connect to MySQL database from Java program and running SELECT and INSERT queries to retrieve and update data with step by step guide. In order to connect and access the MySQL database from Java, you can use JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) API, which is bundled in JDK itself. JDBC allows you to connect to any database like Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL, provided you have the vendor's implementation of the JDBC driver interface, which is required to connect the database. You can connect to MySQL from Java by using MySQL's Type 4 JDBC driver which is bundled in mysql-connector-java-5.1.23-bin.jar. It's a type 4, pure Java driver, which means you don't need any native library or JDBC ODBC bridge, all you need is to put this JAR in your classpath.

This JAR contains "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" which is the key for making database connection from Java program to MySQL DB. If this JAR is not present in the classpath, then while running this program you will get java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver, so always make sure you have this JAR in the classpath.

By the way, if you are looking for some resources like books and courses to master JDBC programming in Java, I suggest you take a look at these online JDBC courses for beginners. It's a great course of direct classroom lectures and covers JDBC in-depth and cover two of the most popular database SQL Server 2008 and Oracle.

This book also teaches you how to work in the Netbeans Integrated environment, similar to our example, and provides all necessary tools and knowledge to handle database programming in Java. An ideal book for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as database programmers and software engineers.

Connecting to MySQL database using JDBC

In order to connect to MySQL database, you need four things :

1. JDBC URL (jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test)
2. Username ("root")
3. Password ("root")
4. Database with table to demonstrate query (Book database with few books in test database)

The JDBC URL for MySQL database starts with "jdbc:mysql" that's the protocol connection is using to connect, followed by the host and port where your MySQL database is running. In our case, I am running MySQL server in localhost, which by default listens to port 3306, unless you change it during installation.

The next part is "test" which is an empty database that comes with MySQL. I have created a Book table into this database for our example purpose. If you want, you can also create the same table by using the following SQL :

CREATE TABLE `books` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `author` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

and you can use the following SQL to populate the table with some good books :

INSERT INTO test.books (id, `name`, author) 
    VALUES (1, 'Effective Java', 'Joshua Bloch');
INSERT INTO test.books (id, `name`, author) 
    VALUES (2, 'Java Concurrency in Practice', 'Brian Goetz');

Java Program to connect MySQL from Java

Now, let's write our Java program to connect to this MySQL database running on localhost. Its important to close the database connection, statement, and result-set object once you are done with them. It's also important to close them in the finally block with their try-catch block because their close method can also throw Exception and in that case your program may start leaking those resources, see my post right way to close resources in Java for more details.

Alternatively, you can use try-with-resource statement introduced in Java 7 to open and close SQL resources. In fact that's the standard way from JDK 1.7 onward.

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.sql.Statement;

/**
 * Simple Java program to connect to MySQL database running on localhost and
 * running SELECT and INSERT query to retrieve and add data.
 * @author Javin Paul
 */
public class JavaToMySQL {

    // JDBC URL, username and password of MySQL server
    private static final String url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test";
    private static final String user = "root";
    private static final String password = "root";

    // JDBC variables for opening and managing connection
    private static Connection con;
    private static Statement stmt;
    private static ResultSet rs;

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        String query = "select count(*) from books";

        try {
            // opening database connection to MySQL server
            con = DriverManager.getConnection(url, user, password);

            // getting Statement object to execute query
            stmt = con.createStatement();

            // executing SELECT query
            rs = stmt.executeQuery(query);

            while (rs.next()) {
                int count = rs.getInt(1);
                System.out.println("Total number of books in the table : " 
                                       + count);
            }

        } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {
            sqlEx.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            //close connection ,stmt and resultset here
            try { con.close(); } catch(SQLException se) { 
                               /*can't do anything */ }
            try { stmt.close(); } catch(SQLException se) { 
                              /*can't do anything */ }
            try { rs.close(); } catch(SQLException se) { 
                               /*can't do anything */ }
        }
    }

}

java.sql.SQLException: No suitable driver found for jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test/book

When I first run this program, I got the error "No suitable driver found for jdbc:mysql", because MySQL driver JAR, mysql-connector-java-5.1.23-bin.jar was not present in the classpath.

java.sql.SQLException: No suitable driver found 
for jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test/book
    at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:689)
    at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:247)
    at JavaToMySQL.main(JavaToMySQL.java:29)
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at JavaToMySQL.main(JavaToMySQL.java:46)
Java Result: 1

When I again ran the Java program after including MySQL JDBC driver in Classpath, I was greeted with the following error, because I had included table name also in the JDBC URL String as "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test/book", let's try to run after removing the table from JDBC String

com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLSyntaxErrorException:
 Unknown database 'test/book'
    at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl
.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:62)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl
.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)
    at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:408)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.handleNewInstance(Util.java:411)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.getInstance(Util.java:386)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.SQLError.createSQLException(SQLError.java:1053)

Now it ran successful and printed the following output :

Total number of books in the table: 2

This is correct because our books table only has two books, Effective Java and Java Concurrency in Practice.

By the way, if you have a MySQL driver during compile time but missed it during run-time, you will get java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver. You can follow the solution give here to deal with this error.

How to retrieve data using SELECT Query to MySQL using JDBC

In order to get data from the database, you can run a SELECT query. In our first example, we have used the SELECT query, but we only get the count of records, this time we will retrieve the record itself. most of the program will remain the same, except the SQL query and the part which retrieve data from the ResultSet object.

String query = "select id, name, author from books";

rs = stmt.executeQuery(query);

while (rs.next()) {
   int id = rs.getInt(1);
   String name = rs.getString(2);
   String author = rs.getString(3);
   System.out.printf("id : %d, name: %s, author : %s %n", id, name, author);
 }

This will print the following output :

id : 1, name: Effective Java, author : Joshua Bloch 
id : 2, name: Java Concurrency in Practice, author : Brian Goetz 

Couple of things to pay attention to here. See the rs.getInt(1) method call, well that is to retrieve an integer column, which is "id" in our case. In JDBC, column index begin with 1, so rs.getInt(1) will read first column as Integer.

It will throw InvalidColumnIndexException if we provide invalid column index, as many Java developer mistakenly provide "0" for first column i.e. rs.getInt(0). 

Accessing columns with index is risky, it's better to use column name instead of indexes i.e. rs.getInt("id") will return the value of the id column. It is also one of the JDBC best practices you will learn in my post 10 JDBC best practices for Java developers.

Similarly, getString() is used to read String or VARCHAR columns. The loop will run until rs.next() return false, when number of rows comes to an end. This query returns 2 rows and that's why the loop runs twice, printing details of two books loaded from MySQL database.

How to insert data using INSERT Query to MySQL using JDBC

Inserting data is quite similar to retrieving data, just use INSERT query instead of SELECT query. Also this time, we will use executeUpdate() instead of executeQuery() method. This method is used to run INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE queries and also SQL DDL statements like CREATE, ALER or DROP table that returns nothing, so we don't need ResultSet object. So you must delete all references of ResultSet object from our program, remove executeQuery() and modify SQL Query String as follows :

String query = "INSERT INTO test.books (id, name, author) \n" +
               " VALUES (3, 'Head First Java', 'Kathy Sieara');";

// executing SELECT query
stmt.executeUpdate(query);

Once you run the program, you can go back and check the database. This time you will see 3 records in your book table, as shown below :

That's all about how to connect to MySQL from Java program. Once you are able to make a successful connection you can run SELECT, INSERT, DELETE or UPDATE query just like you do using MySQL command line client or MySQL GUI. Like connecting to any other database, we have used the Connection object to make a connection and the ResultSet object to get the result of our SQL Query. 

Just make sure that your MySQL Server is started and running before you connect and mysql-connector-java-5.1.17-bin.jar is in CLASSPATH to avoid nasty ClassNotFoundException.

Once you are comfortable with connecting, retrieving data and inserting data, next step is to learn how to use PreparedStatement in Java to prevent SQL injection. In a production system, you should always use PreparedStatement and bind variables.


If you like this JDBC tutorial and are hungry to learn more about connecting and operating databases from Java applications, you may like the following amazing articles too :

• How to connect to Oracle Database from Java Application (learn here)
• What is difference between connected and disconnected RowSet in Java? (answer)
• How to use JDBC connection pool in Spring framework? (solution)
• 5 Simple things to improve performance of Java database applications (tips)
• Difference between java.util.Date and java.sql.Date in Java? (answer)
• How to do INSERT and UPDATE using JDBC Batch statement? (solution)
• 10 JDBC Questions from Java Interviews to answer (questions)

Resources :

• If you don't have MySQL database, you can download from here 
• If you don't have MySQL JDBC driver, you can also download the mysql-connector-java-5.1.17-bin.jar file from here. 
• You can get recommended JDBC book, Practical Database Programming with Java By Ying Bai here