Hi Eric, I am on a phone connection at home, so downloading the jars to take a look isn't a quick option, but I see one reference to: com.sleepycat.je.Database.* so you might try: import com.sleepycat.je.Database.*; One trick you can use with jars is to look at what classes it contains with: jar tf *.jar or look at one or all classes with: jar xf *.jar It's possible that the jar was re-organized after the article was written. The opening use of the db variable: "XmlContainer db = null" doesn't make sense but I guess it doesn't break anything to have it there. art