Java – Oracle thin driver vs. OCI driver. Pros and Cons

javaoracleoracle-call-interfacepersistence

When you develop a Java application that talks to oracle DBs, there are 2 options right? One is oracle thin driver, and the other is OCI driver that requires its own installation (please correct if I'm misunderstanding).

Now, what are the pros and cons? Obviously thin driver sounds much better in terms of installation, but is there anything that OCI can and the thin one can't?

Develop environment is Tomcat6 + Spring 3.0 + JPA(Hibernate) + apache-DBCP

Best Answer

The choice of the driver depends several factors. The nature of your calls to database (e.g. it seem like your app won't be using lots of stored proc calls), requirements for failover (e.g. clustered Oracle servers) and distributed transactions. Generally it is recommended to use the thin driver, but if there is some specific feature of the OCI driver that you just must have you may have to consider the OCI driver. It also been said that drivers in Oracle 10 and higher do have matching capabilities and there is practically no performance difference on modern JVMs.

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