Unicode Character Sets: See the next section, as well as Character Sets, Collations, Unicode, for information on this MySQL feature. If you have something misconfigured, it will usually show up as an error with a message similar to Illegal mix of collations.

Server-side Prepared Statements: Connector/J 3.1 will automatically detect and use server-side prepared statements when they are available (MySQL server version 4.1.0 and newer).

Starting with version 3.1.7, the driver scans SQL you are preparing using all variants of Connection.prepareStatement() to determine if it is a supported type of statement to prepare on the server side, and if it is not supported by the server, it instead prepares it as a client-side emulated prepared statement. You can disable this feature by passing emulateUnsupportedPstmts=false in your JDBC URL.

If your application encounters issues with server-side prepared statements, you can revert to the older client-side emulated prepared statement code that is still presently used for MySQL servers older than 4.1.0 with the connection property useServerPrepStmts=false.

Datetimes with all-zero components (0000-00-00 ...): These values cannot be represented reliably in Java. Connector/J 3.0.x always converted them to NULL when being read from a ResultSet.

Connector/J 3.1 throws an exception by default when these values are encountered, as this is the most correct behavior according to the JDBC and SQL standards. This behavior can be modified using the zeroDateTimeBehavior configuration property. The permissible values are:

Starting with Connector/J 3.1.7, ResultSet.getString() can be decoupled from this behavior using noDatetimeStringSync=true (the default value is false) so that you can retrieve the unaltered all-zero value as a String. Note that this also precludes using any time zone conversions, therefore the driver will not allow you to enable noDatetimeStringSync and useTimezone at the same time.

New SQLState Codes: Connector/J 3.1 uses SQL:1999 SQLState codes returned by the MySQL server (if supported), which are different from the legacy X/Open state codes that Connector/J 3.0 uses. If connected to a MySQL server older than MySQL-4.1.0 (the oldest version to return SQLStates as part of the error code), the driver will use a built-in mapping. You can revert to the old mapping by using the configuration property useSqlStateCodes=false.

ResultSet.getString(): Calling ResultSet.getString() on a BLOB column will now return the address of the byte[] array that represents it, instead of a String representation of the BLOB. BLOB values have no character set, so they cannot be converted to java.lang.Strings without data loss or corruption.

To store strings in MySQL with LOB behavior, use one of the TEXT types, which the driver will treat as a java.sql.Clob.

Debug builds: Starting with Connector/J 3.1.8 a debug build of the driver in a file named mysql-connector-java-version-bin-g.jar is shipped alongside the normal binary jar file that is named mysql-connector-java-version-bin.jar.

Starting with Connector/J 3.1.9, we do not ship the .class files unbundled, they are only available in the JAR archives that ship with the driver.

Do not use the debug build of the driver unless instructed to do so when reporting a problem or bug, as it is not designed to be run in production environments, and will have adverse performance impact when used. The debug binary also depends on the Aspect/J runtime library, which is located in the src/lib/aspectjrt.jar file that comes with the Connector/J distribution.