Installed applications use JDBC providers to interact with relational databases.
The JDBC provider object supplies the specific JDBC driver implementation class for access to a specific vendor database. To create a pool of connections to that database, you associate a data source with the JDBC provider. Together, the JDBC provider and the data source objects are functionally equivalent to the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) connection factory, which provides connectivity with a non-relational database.