5.1 Statement Overview

A Statement object is used to send SQL statements to a database. There are actually three kinds of Statement objects, all of which act as containers for executing SQL statements on a given connection: Statement, PreparedStatement, which inherits from Statement, and CallableStatement, which inherits from PreparedStatement. They are specialized for sending particular types of SQL statements; a Statement object is used to execute a simple SQL statement with no parameters, a PreparedStatement object is used to execute a precompiled SQL statement with or without IN parameters, and a CallableStatement object is used to execute a call to a database stored procedure.
The Statement interface provides basic methods for executing statements and retrieving results. The PreparedStatement interface adds methods for dealing with IN parameters; the CallableStatement interface adds methods for dealing with OUT parameters.

In the JDBC 2.0 core API, the ResultSet interface has a set of new updater methods (updateInt, updateBoolean, updateString, and so on) and other new related methods that make it possible to update table column values programmatically. This new API also adds methods to the Statement interface (and PreparedStatement and CallableStatement interfaces) so that update statements may be executed as a batch rather than singly.