Your design here is not good. Applet should be lightweight--- as small as possible. Because you use Applet to access DB, you have to download jdbc-odbc driver, too. As such, your Applet is very fat. In such a case, if you just do demo, it is OK. If you do development, probably you have to re-archtect the design. One possible solution is
introduce a plug-in servlet engine (for instance, Tomcat, free) and use a DB servlet to access the DB. Please let me know your situation, in particular, what your boss's idea is.