Many applications require databases to store information, ranging from embedded data using tools such as Apache Derby to large enterprise databases such as Oracle. Java does not only provide many different APIs to access these databases, such as JDBC and JPA, but also provides the facilities for managing databases, whether they are local to the developer's machine or hosted remotely. We'll look at developing against databases in the next chapter, but first, let's take a look at how we can manage databases from within NetBeans.

The first entry in the Services window in NetBeans (on a fresh installation with no additional plugins installed) is the Databases explorer:

Expanding the Databases node in the Services window allows us to see what databases we have registered along with the database drivers that are installed within NetBeans and any connections that we have made to the databases.