7.1 PreparedStatement Overview

The PreparedStatement interface inherits from Statement and differs from it in two ways:

11. Instances of PreparedStatement contain an SQL statement that has already been compiled. This is what makes a statement "prepared."
12. The SQL statement contained in a PreparedStatement object may have one or more IN parameters. An IN parameter is a parameter whose value is not specified when the SQL statement is created. Instead, the statement has a question mark ("?") as a placeholder for each IN parameter. The "?" is also known as a parameter marker. An application must set a value for each question mark in a prepared statement before executing the prepared statement.

Because PreparedStatement objects are precompiled, their execution can be faster than that of Statement objects. Consequently, an SQL statement that is executed many times is often created as a PreparedStatement object to increase efficiency.

Being a subclass of Statement, PreparedStatement inherits all the functionality of Statement. In addition, it adds a set of methods that are needed for setting the values to be sent to the database in place of the placeholders for IN parameters. Also, the three methods execute, executeQuery, and executeUpdate are modified so that they take no argument. The Statement forms of these methods (the forms that take an SQL statement parameter) should never be used with a PreparedStatement object.