Yes, SQL!
Uri Cohen presents the key characteristics of SQL and NoSQL databases and how to create a layer on top of distributed data stores in order to use SQL to query for data. For further information please contact Gigaspaces.
Uri Cohen presents the key characteristics of SQL and NoSQL databases and how to create a layer on top of distributed data stores in order to use SQL to query for data. For further information please contact Gigaspaces.

In this virtual panel, the editors of InfoQ.com (Floyd Marinescu) and ODBMS.org (Roberto V. Zicari) asked a group of leading persistence solution architects their views on the current state of the union in persistence in the Java community.
Kasper Sørensen has created a new open source project at eobjects.dk called MetaModel. The project is a common domain model, query engine, and optimizer for different types of datastores, such as relational databases and flat files. MetaModel is a Java library that provides a fluent, object-oriented interface for SQL compliant queries.
Azadeh Ahadian of IBM has published an article introducing JLINQ on IBM's developerWorks site. Despite the name, JLINQ does not have much in common with Microsoft's LINQ, rather it is an Eclipse plugin providing integration with a database and runtime DAO code generation. The plugin is part of IBM's Developer Workbench that is coming with Viper, the next release of DB2.
HSQLDB creator Thomas Mueller has released 1.0 final of H2, his pure Java database successor to HSQLDB. H2's focus is to be best database for the lower end (low number of concurrent connections, embedded usage). InfoQ spoke to H2 creator Thomas Mueller to find out more.
A heated debate started a few weeks ago initiated by members of the Hibernate team, arguing that using an abstraction framework on top of an ORM is a bad idea, citing Spring's HibernateTemplate as a specific example. Along the theme of levels of abstraction, Brian McCalister also surveyed various convenience frameworks over JDBC.
Java 6.0 will include a number of Java Database Connectivity enhancements collectively known as JDBC 4.0. One of the main goals of JDBC 4.0 was to try and reduce the amount of boilerplate JDBC code a developer had to write.
HSQLDB creator Thomas Mueller recently released the v0.9 of H2, his pure Java database successor to HSQLDB. H2 benchmarks significantly faster than HSQLDB, supports JDBC and ODBC, supports XA, can be clustered for HA and supports encryption.
The latest version of JRuby will be presented to JavaOne attendees this week. Included in the demonstrations is a working Rails application and an ActiveRecord adapter backed by JDBC.

Java Transaction Design Strategies shows how to design an effective transaction management strategy using the transaction models provided by Java-based frameworks such as EJB and Spring. Local, programmatic, declarative, and XA models are explained; the book concludes with a set of design patterns show how to effecitvely use these models.