Microsofthas announced the release of the second technical preview Microsoft JDBC Driver 6.0 for SQL Server. The update driver provides robust data access to Microsoft
SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database for Java-based applications.
New features in this preview are as stated below in the
official blog:
Always Encrypted
You can now use Always Encrypted with Microosft JDBC Driver 6.0 for SQL Server Preview. This is a a new SQL Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database security feature in order to prevent sensitive data from being seen in plain text in the SQL instance. You will now be able to transparently encrypt the data in the application, so that the SQL Server will only be handling the encrypted data and not plain text values.
Microsoft states,
“If a SQL instance or host machine is compromised, an attacker can only access ciphertext of your sensitive data. Use the JDBC Driver 6.0 Preview or ADO.NET driver to encrypt plain text data, store the encrypted data in SQL Server 2016 CTP (and above) or SQL Azure Database. Likewise, use the driver to decrypt your encrypted data.”
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
IDNs allow your web server to use Unicode characters for server names, enabling support for more languages. By using the new Microsoft JDBC Driver 6.0 for SQL Server Preview, you will be able to convert a Unicode serverName to ASCII compatible encoding (Punycode) when required during a connection.
Table-Valued Parameters (TVPs)
The TVP support allows a client application to send parameterized data to the server more efficiently by sending multiple rows to the server with a single call. You can now use the JDBC Driver 6.0 Preview to encapsulate rows of data in a client application and send the data to the server in a single parameterized command.
Azure Active Directory (AAD)
AAD authentication is a mechanism of connecting to Azure SQL Database v12 using identities in AAD. Use AAD authentication to centrally manage identities of database users and as an alternative to SQL Server authentication. The JDBC Driver 6.0 CTP allows you to specify your AAD credentials in the JDBC connection string to connect to Azure SQL DB.
AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AG)
The driver now offers support to transparent connections to AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The driver rapidly discovers the current AlwaysOn topology of your server infrastructure and connects to the current active server transparently.
The company concluded by saying,
“We are committed to continuously update the JDBC driver to bring more feature support for connecting to SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL DW. Please stay tuned for upcoming releases that will have additional feature support. This applies to our wide range of client drivers including PHP 7.0, Node.js, ODBC, and ADO.NET which are already available.”