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Clusters of workstations become more and more popular to power data server applications such as large scale Web sites or e-Commerce applications. Successful open-source tools exist for clustering the front tiers of such sites (web servers and application servers). No comparable success has been achieved for scaling the backend databases. An expensive SMP machine is required if the database tier becomes the bottleneck. The few tools that exist for clustering databases are often database-specific and/or proprietary.

Clustered JDBC (C-JDBC) addresses this problem. It is an open-source, flexible and efficient middleware for database clustering. C-JDBC implements the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Databases (RAIDb) concept. It presents a single virtual database to the application through the JDBC interface and does not require any modification to existing applications. Furthermore, C-JDBC works with any database engine that provides a JDBC driver, without modification to the database engine. The C-JDBC framework is open, configurable and extensible to support large and complex database cluster architectures offering various performance, fault tolerance and availability tradeoffs.