IBM WebSphere Application Server V6 provides implementation and support for the new J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) specification V1.5 as part of the J2EE 1.4 platform. The JCA provides a standard mechanism that allows modern J2EE applications to connect and use heterogeneous resources from various existing enterprise information systems (EIS) as well as modern relational database systems. Based on the JCA, WebSphere provides client applications all system services regarding connection, transaction, and security management on behalf of the resource managers.

This paper discusses the most common problem areas that are associated with JCA connections in WebSphere Application Server V6. Issues that are caused by JCA components or JCA connection configuration errors can appear as one or more of the following initial symptoms:

- A JDBC call returns incorrect data to the application

- An application cannot connect to or access a database or EIS

Those symptoms are observed through WebSphere error messages with the prefixes DSRA, WSCL, J2CA, WTRN, CONM, or SQLException or with database error codes.

This paper applies to WebSphere Application Server V6 for distributed systems only. It does not cover WebSphere Application Server for z/OS.