What is the actual use of Class.forName(“oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver”) while connecting to a database?

by

It obtains a reference to the class object with the FQCN (fully qualified class name) oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver.

It doesn’t “do” anything in terms of connecting to a database, aside from ensure that the specified class is loaded by the current classloader. There is no fundamental difference between writing

Class<?> driverClass = Class.forName("oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver");
// and
Class<?> stringClass = Class.forName("java.lang.String");

Class.forName("com.example.some.jdbc.driver") calls show up in legacy code that uses JDBC because that is the legacy way of loading a JDBC driver.

From The Java Tutorial:

In previous versions of JDBC, to obtain a connection, you first had to initialize your JDBC driver by calling the method Class.forName. This methods required an object of type java.sql.Driver. Each JDBC driver contains one or more classes that implements the interface java.sql.Driver.
…
Any JDBC 4.0 drivers that are found in your class path are automatically loaded. (However, you must manually load any drivers prior to JDBC 4.0 with the method Class.forName.)

Further reading (read: questions this is a dup of)

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