To connect your Java application to a MySQL database, you can use the JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity) API. First, you need to download the JDBC driver for MySQL. You can download it at https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/. Once downloaded, add the .jar file to your classpath. Next, establish a connection to your MySQL database in your Java code. Here is a basic example: ```java import java.sql.Connection; import java.sql.DriverManager; import java.sql.SQLException; public class Main { public static void main(String[] argv) { System.out.println("Connecting to database..."); Connection conn = null; try { // JDBC driver name and database URL String JDBC_DRIVER = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"; String DB_URL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/DBNAME"; // Database credentials String USER = "username"; String PASS = "password"; // Register JDBC driver Class.forName(JDBC_DRIVER); // Open a connection System.out.println("Connecting to a selected database..."); conn = DriverManager.getConnection(DB_URL, USER, PASS); System.out.println("Connected database successfully..."); } catch (SQLException se) { // Handle errors for JDBC se.printStackTrace(); } catch (Exception e) { // Handle errors for Class.forName e.printStackTrace(); } finally { // Finally block used to close resources try { if (conn != null) conn.close(); } catch (SQLException se) { se.printStackTrace(); } // End finally try } // End try System.out.println("Goodbye!"); } } ``` In the code above, replace "DBNAME", "username", and "password" with your actual database name, username, and password. Finally, you use the conn object to create Statement and ResultSet objects, which you can then use to query and retrieve data from your database. More info can be found here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-j/8.0/en/connector-j-usagenotes-connect-drivermanager.html Don't forget to gracefully close the database connection when you're done (with conn.close()) to prevent memory leaks.