You're misunderstanding -- JDBC is (more or less) equivalent to the DBI in Perl. Both are middle layers which allow driver authors to write to a spec and application developers to write to the layer without worrying about the driver being used. There are caveats to that, of course :-) But if you're using general database capabilities both work quite well.

Having used both, DBI is faster but JDBC has more metadata capabilities and is generally more featureful. It's also more difficult to use (like most things in Java) because you have to always be aware of datatypes, which Perl and DBI (and well-written drivers) make transparent for you.

In addition, most (if not all) of the big databases have Type-4 (pure Java) drivers for JDBC. This means that you don't have to worry about client libraries, compiling, etc. across different platforms -- the same Type-4 Oracle JDBC driver will work on both Linux and Win32 with no modifications whatsoever. Very nice.

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode