Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the Java programming language which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java database connectivity. It is part of the Java Standard Edition platform, from Oracle Corporation. It provides methods to query and update data in a database, and is oriented toward relational databases. A JDBC-to-ODBC bridge enables connections to any ODBC-accessible data source in the Java virtual machine (JVM) host environment.

Sun Microsystems released JDBC as part of Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1 on February 19, 1997. Since then it has been part of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE).

The JDBC classes are contained in the Java package java.sql and javax.sql, as well as a few other classes elsewhere. Everything involved in JDBC is exported through module java.sql.

Starting with version 3.1, JDBC has been developed under the Java Community Process. JSR 54 specifies JDBC 3.0 (included in J2SE 1.4), JSR 114 specifies the JDBC Rowset additions, and JSR 221 is the specification of JDBC 4.0 (included in Java SE 6).

JDBC 4.1, is specified by a maintenance release 1 of JSR 221 and is included in Java SE 7.

JDBC 4.2, is specified by a maintenance release 2 of JSR 221 and is included in Java SE 8.

The latest version, JDBC 4.3, is specified by a maintenance release 3 of JSR 221 and is included in Java SE 9.

Since JDBC is mostly a collection of interface definitions and specifications, it allows multiple implementations of these interfaces to exist and be used by the same application at runtime. The API provides a mechanism for dynamically loading the correct Java packages and registering them with the JDBC Driver Manager (DriverManager). DriverManager is used as a Connection factory for creating JDBC connections.