Alice@Development: Setting up H2 database connection in Eclipse Luna in a Maven project

Monday, April 25, 2016

Setting up H2 database connection in Eclipse Luna in a Maven project

Sources:

Download the H2 Database Engine

Open the pom.xml of your project >
add H2 database engine as a dependency.

For this tutorial version 1.4.191 was used.
Maven repository: http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.h2database/h2
To download it, right-click on the Project Name in Eclipse Project Explorer > Maven > Download Sources

Download Eclipse DTP (Data Tools Platform)

In Eclipse, go to Help > Eclipse Marketplace... >
search Data Tools Platform >
click Install >
select both Extender SDK and Enablement Extender SDK >
accept licence agreement >
wait patiently until a popup informs you that the installation was successful and Eclipse needs to be restarted.

Open the "Database Development" perspective

This perspective was installed with the DTP.

In Eclipse, go to Window > Open Perspective > Other... > Database Development

Add Database Connection

In the Database Development perspective, in the Data Source Explorere, right-click on Database Connections > New... >
select Generic JDBC and enter a Name for the connection then click Next >
select H2 Driver from the list of drivers.
if the list is empty, click New Driver Definition button >

on the Name/Type tab, click Generic JDBC Driver and give it a unique Driver Name.
on the JAR list tab, click Add JAR/Zip... > select H2 JAR file from Maven repository > click Open.
on the Properties tab, enter a Database Name for the database, and the following:

Connection URL - jdbc:h2:~/test
Driver Class - org.h2.Driver
User ID - sa

click OK.

click Test Connection to see that the connection works.
click Finish.

Now you can connect to the database by right-click on the name > Connect.
Once you connected you can edit the tables by right-click on the table name > Data > Edit

Connect to the Database

To connect to a database, a Java application first needs to load the database driver, and then get a connection. A simple way to do that is using the following code:

import java.sql.*;
public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] a)
            throws Exception {
        Class.forName("org.h2.Driver");
        Connection conn = DriverManager.
            getConnection("jdbc:h2:~/test", "sa", "");
        // add application code here
        conn.close();
    }
}

Create a new Database

By default, H2 creates a new database on the first connection, if the one with the specified name does not exist.
After the jdbc:h2: prefix a path to the database can be given. The ~/test creates a new test database in the user's home directory.

Alice@Development