Schematic of the JDBC-ODBC bridge
The JDBC type 1 driver, also known as the JDBC-ODBC bridge is a database driver implementation that employs the ODBC driver to connect to the database. The driver converts JDBC method calls into ODBC function calls. The bridge is usually used when there is no pure-Java driver available for a particular database.

The driver is implemented in the sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver class and comes with the Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition.

The driver is platform-dependent as it makes use of ODBC which in turn depends on native libraries of the operating system. Also, using this driver has got other dependencies such as ODBC must be installed on the computer having the driver and the database which is being connected to must support an ODBC driver. Hence the use of this driver is discouraged if the alternative of a pure-Java driver is available.

See also