Full JDBC support
InterClient may be the most fully functional jdbc driver available.
Here's some information found in the release notes of other jdbc drivers:
With dbAnywhere to sql server (now called adaptive server) a statement with a result set
must either be explicitly closed or the result set exhausted before it can be reused.
This is a limitation enforced
by the DbLIB client libraries to process all of the results before issuing another SQL request.
Also with dbAnywhere, ResultSet.getBytes() is not supported to Sybase/MS sql server.
dbANYWHERE does not support DATE and TIME literals, escape characters in LIKE clauses are not
supported, outer join escape syntax is not supported.
Using jConnect for SQL Server you cannot use the following DatabaseMetaData methods on a connection
in the middle of a transaction: getColumns(), getColumnPrivileges(),
getTablePrivileges(), getPrimaryKeys(),getCrossReference(),getIndexInfo().
So if autocommit is off, you can't precede any of these methods with uncommitted SQL execution!
This is because these methods create temporary tables using CREATE TABLE which is
not allowed within a multi-statement transaction in SQL Server.
outer join escape syntax is not supported for SQL Server.
row counts (from executeUpdate) are not available for SQL Anywhere.
stored procedures in SQL Anywhere cannot return both result sets and output parameters, they can return only one
or the other.
setAutoCommit off didn't work in SQLAnywhere prior to 5.5.
Reliability and ease of use
InterClient is easy to configure and use. Compare with Sybase jConnect
in which procedures must be installed on the server in advance before
database meta data can be accessed.
Internationalization
We support 20 of the 22 interbase character sets for direct transliterations into interbase.
Data is transliterated to the character set of choice, generally using the native
locale-specific encoding of the user. This provides much better performance
than drivers that use only a single universal encoding on the wire.
Interclient is completely localized, with easily translatable resource bundles
for all error messages and hard-wired text used by the driver.
Extensions
We currently have extensions for describing input meta data (ParameterMetaData),
as well as the ability to retrieve
result set meta data before a prepared statement is executed.
Support for features unique to interbase are forthcoming.
High performance.
Leverages the flexibility of a class 3 driver, and shrink-wrapped around InterBase.
Pure Java
Fully portable zero-config/zero-install client.
Well ported JDBC server
Most JDBC servers work only on Windows
Multitier configuration
Service may be proxied to any interbase server thru an interserver middle tier.