Drivolution aims at reducing the cost, risk, and downtime associated with driver distribution, deployment and upgrade in large production environments.

Drivolution is an architecture in which drivers are stored in the database and dynamically downloaded by client applications at their first connection. Client applications use a small, special driver – a bootloader – that downloads, installs and upgrades necessary database drivers transparently to the application. Existing database management mechanisms can be used to define and enforce desired security policies. 

The Drivolution protocol works like DHCP where the bootloader sends a request to the server indicating which database it wants to access, user credentials, database API (JDBC, ODBC, ...) and the platform it runs on (JRE 5, linux x86_64, ...). The Drivolution server sends an offer including a lease and the driver code that is downloaded and installed by the boatloader. The full protocol specification is described in the developer guide available from the documentation section.

The figure below shows a Java implementation of Drivolution. The Drivolution Server can be used as a standalone service or embedded in any Java-based database or middleware. We have also implemented a generic JDBC Bootloader that is able to provide Drivolution features to any Java application and database with a JDBC driver.  

Additional information about Drivolution can be found in the documentation section.