Open sourcing the Microsoft JDBC Driver and Maven support

We are excited to announce the open sourcing of the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server! By open sourcing the driver, we hope to get quicker feedback from the community, release on a faster cadence, and develop new features based on the scenarios Java developers need to support. Please check out the announcement video.

Open sourcing the driver includes:

  • Java source code on GitHub under MIT license
    • We hope developers will participate in developing the driver with us by filing issues and making pull requests
  • Build scripts for Maven and Ant
    • Build your own jars to support either JDBC 4.1 specification (for use with JRE 7) or JDBC 4.2 specification (for use with JRE 8)

With open sourcing, we have finally made the driver available on the Maven Central Repository. We have two jars available to support JRE 7 or 8. They can be selected by changing the version –  “6.1.0.jre8”  or  “6.1.0.jre7” . Add the JDBC driver to your Maven project by adding the following code to your POM file to include it as a dependency in your project.

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

The JDBC driver can be used to connect to SQL anywhere. Use it to connect to SQL Server (on-prem or in the cloud), Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Feature support for the JDBC driver has carried over from our JDBC Driver 6.0. This includes support for:

  • Always Encrypted
  • Azure Active Directory authentication
  • Table-Valued Parameters
  • Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
  • Extended support for Parameterized Queries
  • Bulk Copy
  • Transparent connections to AlwaysOn Availability Groups

We look forward to working together to bring value to Java developers using SQL Server. If you have any questions or issues, please report them on the GitHub repository. To get started with developing apps in your programming language of choice and SQL Server, check out our new tutorials.

Andrea Lam (Program Manager)
andrela@microsoft.com