JDBC 4.0 adds many interesting new features to the database world. Ease of use has definitely come to the forefront with the latest changes. While database driver loading is one less thing you need to do with Mustang, the other changes add to what you can do with JDBC. Enhancements seem to be everywhere—from the improvements to exception handling and BLOBs, to CLOBs, connections, and statements. You can get notification of new statement events, and you can check for connection closure now where you couldn’t before. Most of the rest of the changes involve the addition of SQL 2003-related support to the Java platform, with its new national character set support, SQL ROWID access, and the very popular XML data type support. Also, the new annotations available with JDBC 4.0 can greatly simplify your life.