Driver is a program installed on a workstation or a server; it allows programs to interact with a Database Management System (DBMS). Such as,JDBC driver provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interface (APIs) available in J2EE.
A data provider is a set of libraries that is used to communicate with data source. Such as,SQL data provider for SQL,Oracle data provider for Oracle,OLE DB data provider for access,excel and MySQL. It serves as a bridge between an application and a data source and is used to retrieve data from a data source and to reconcile changes to that data back to the data source.
