MariaDB Connector Issues

Question

We've been running for a while now using embedded Jetty but due to some upcoming infrastructure changes we're migrating to Tomcat 7. I'm having an issue getting my servlet to recognize the mariadb connector

NO SUITABLE DRIVER FOUND FOR JDBC:MARIADB:// 

This has been running in the past with Jetty, so I haven't made any code changes. I've dropped the mariadb-java-client-1.1.8.jar in the tomcathome/lib directory as in my experience in the past this was all I needed to do. However since I'm still getting this exception I'm not sure how to debug further. I've tried running tomcat with the debug option

BIN/CATALINA.BAT DEBUG  

but I'm not really sure how to use it properly other than running my servlet and viewing the classpath.

Any assistance on the matter would be helpful.

Answer 1

Apparently with Tomcat7/8 and Java 7+ (we are using java8) you must explicitly add the driver in the code:

Class.forName("org.mariadb.jdbc.Driver").newInstance();

I feel like this is a bug with Tomcat7/8 since after Java 6 this was no longer required (and indeed worked in Tomcat5 and 6). Anyway, if anyone else runs into that problem they can resolve it.