WebDevelopment, ColdFusion, Railo, JS, Database and Tech-related by the Co-Founder and CEO of tunesBag.com

Thursday 11 June 2009

Using the H2 database in ColdFusion

Railo is delivered with an embedded database called H2. The description on the homepage says:

Welcome to H2, the Java SQL database. The main feature of H2 are:

* Very fast, open source, JDBC API
* Embedded and server modes; in-memory databases
* Browser based Console application
* Small footprint: around 1 MB jar file size

Such a database fit's perfectly for a current task at tunesBag - the streaming servers should store some data on their own machines and mysql or postgresql just would be overkill for this task. So I decided to give H2 a look and it looks pretty nice.

On my local machine I'm working with ColdFusion 8 as well - the configuration to add H2 support for CF is very easy, just follow the following steps:

  • Download the latest version of H2
  • Drop the h2*.jar file in the WEB-INF/lib directory of your ColdFusion server (directory depends on your type of setup)
  • Restart CF
  • Add a new datasource
  • JDBC URL = jdbc:h2:file:%Path to Database file on your disk%
  • Driver Class = org.h2.Driver
  • Driver name = default
  • User name = sa

That's it - the files holding the data will be created automatically for you. Take a look at the H2 tutorial in order to find out more (e.g. server mode etc).