## Introduction

This Reference contains information about how to use Torque as a Object-Relational mapper (a tool that maps from relational databases to java classes). Torque 4.0 requires JDK 1.6 or higher, Torque 5.0,5.1 JDK 1.8 or higher.

To access a database with Torque, the following steps are needed, which are described in this documentation in detail:

- Define a schema file describing the database structure (tables, columns etc.)
- Generate classes and database creation files from the schema.
- Use the generated classes (and the torque-runtime library classes) to access the database.

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