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Preparing the Database Server for JDBC

Out of the box, Java does not support unix sockets so the PostgreSQL® server must be configured to allow TCP/IP connections. Starting with server version 8.0 TCP/IP connections are allowed from localhost . To allow connections to other interfaces than the loopback interface, you must modify the postgresql.conf file’s listen_addresses setting.

Once you have made sure the server is correctly listening for TCP/IP connections the next step is to verify that users are allowed to connect to the server. Client authentication is setup in pg_hba.conf . Refer to the main PostgreSQL® documentation for details .

When creating a database to be accessed via JDBC it is important to select an appropriate encoding for your data. Many other client interfaces do not care what data you send back and forth, and will allow you to do inappropriate things, but Java makes sure that your data is correctly encoded. Do not use a database that uses the SQL_ASCII encoding. This is not a real encoding and you will have problems the moment you store data in it that does not fit in the seven bit ASCII character set. If you do not know what your encoding will be or are otherwise unsure about what you will be storing the UNICODE encoding is a reasonable default to use.