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23.4. MySQL Connector/J

MySQL provides connectivity for client applications developed in the Java programming language via a JDBC driver, which is called MySQL Connector/J.

MySQL Connector/J is a JDBC-3.0 Type 4 driver, which means that is pure Java, implements version 3.0 of the JDBC specification, and communicates directly with the MySQL server using the MySQL protocol.

Although JDBC is useful by itself, we would hope that if you are not familiar with JDBC that after reading the first few sections of this manual, that you would avoid using naked JDBC for all but the most trivial problems and consider using one of the popular persistence frameworks such as Hibernate, Spring's JDBC templates or Ibatis SQL Maps to do the majority of repetitive work and heavier lifting that is sometimes required with JDBC.

This section is not designed to be a complete JDBC tutorial. If you need more information about using JDBC you might be interested in the following online tutorials that are more in-depth than the information presented here:

Key topics:

23.4.1. Connector/J Versions

There are currently four versions of MySQL Connector/J available:

  • Connector/J 5.1 is current in alpha status. It provides compatibility with all the functionality of MySQL, including 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and the 6.0 alpha release featuring the new Falcon storage engine. Connector/J 5.1 provides ease of development features, including auto-registration with the Driver Manager, standardized validity checks, categorized SQLExceptions, support for the JDBC-4.0 XML processing, per connection client information, NCHAR, NVARCHAR and NCLOB types. This release also includes all bug fixes up to and including Connector/J 5.0.6.

  • Connector/J 5.0 provides support for all the functionality offered by Connector/J 3.1 and includes distributed transaction (XA) support.

  • Connector/J 3.1 was designed for connectivity to MySQL 4.1 and MySQL 5.0 servers and provides support for all the functionality in MySQL 5.0 except distributed transaction (XA) support.

  • Connector/J 3.0 provides core functionality and was designed with connectivity to MySQL 3.x or MySQL 4.1 servers, although it will provide basic compatibility with later versions of MySQL. Connector/J 3.0 does not support server-side prepared statements, and does not support any of the features in versions of MySQL later than 4.1.

The current recommended version for Connector/J is 5.0. This guide covers all three connector versions, with specific notes given where a setting applies to a specific option.

23.4.1.1. Java Versions Supported

MySQL Connector/J supports Java-2 JVMs, including:

  • JDK 1.2.x (only for Connector/J 3.1.x or earlier)

  • JDK 1.3.x

  • JDK 1.4.x

  • JDK 1.5.x

If you are building Connector/J from source using the source distribution (see Section 23.4.2.4, “Installing from the Development Source Tree”) then you must use JDK 1.4.x or newer to compiler the Connector package.

MySQL Connector/J does not support JDK-1.1.x or JDK-1.0.x.

Because of the implementation of java.sql.Savepoint, Connector/J 3.1.0 and newer will not run on JDKs older than 1.4 unless the class verifier is turned off (by setting the -Xverify:none option to the Java runtime). This is because the class verifier will try to load the class definition for java.sql.Savepoint even though it is not accessed by the driver unless you actually use savepoint functionality.

Caching functionality provided by Connector/J 3.1.0 or newer is also not available on JVMs older than 1.4.x, as it relies on java.util.LinkedHashMap which was first available in JDK-1.4.0.

23.4.2. Connector/J Installation

You can install the Connector/J package using two methods, using either the binary or source distribution. The binary distribution provides the easiest methods for installation; the source distribution enables you to customize your installation further. With either solution, you must manually add the Connector/J location to your Java CLASSPATH.

23.4.2.1. Installing Connector/J from a Binary Distribution

The easiest method of installation is to use the binary distribution of the Connector/J package. The binary distribution is available either as a Tar/Gzip or Zip file which you must extract to a suitable location and then optionally make the information about the package available by changing your CLASSPATH (see Section 23.4.2.2, “Installing the Driver and Configuring the CLASSPATH).

MySQL Connector/J is distributed as a .zip or .tar.gz archive containing the sources, the class files, and the JAR archive named mysql-connector-java-[version]-bin.jar, and starting with Connector/J 3.1.8 a debug build of the driver in a file named mysql-connector-java-[version]-bin-g.jar.

Starting with Connector/J 3.1.9, the .class files that constitute the JAR files are only included as part of the driver JAR file.

You should not use the debug build of the driver unless instructed to do so when reporting a problem ors bug to MySQL AB, 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.

You will need to use the appropriate graphical or command-line utility to extract the distribution (for example, WinZip for the .zip archive, and tar for the .tar.gz archive). Because there are potentially long filenames in the distribution, we use the GNU tar archive format. You will need to use GNU tar (or an application that understands the GNU tar archive format) to unpack the .tar.gz variant of the distribution.

23.4.2.2. Installing the Driver and Configuring the CLASSPATH

Once you have extracted the distribution archive, you can install the driver by placing mysql-connector-java-[version]-bin.jarin your classpath, either by adding the full path to it to your CLASSPATH environment variable, or by directly specifying it with the command line switch -cp when starting your JVM.

If you are going to use the driver with the JDBC DriverManager, you would use com.mysql.jdbc.Driver as the class that implements java.sql.Driver.

You can set the CLASSPATH environment variable under UNIX, Linux or Mac OS X either locally for a user within their .profile, .login or other login file. You can also set it globally by editing the global /etc/profile file.

For example, under a C shell (csh, tcsh) you would add the Connector/J driver to your CLASSPATH using the following:

shell> setenv CLASSPATH /path/mysql-connector-java-[ver]-bin.jar:$CLASSPATH

Or with a Bourne-compatible shell (sh, ksh, bash):

export set CLASSPATH=/path/mysql-connector-java-[ver]-bin.jar:$CLASSPATH

Within Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, you must set the environment variable through the System control panel.

If you want to use MySQL Connector/J with an application server such as Tomcat or JBoss, you will have to read your vendor's documentation for more information on how to configure third-party class libraries, as most application servers ignore the CLASSPATH environment variable. For configuration examples for some J2EE application servers, see Section 23.4.5.2, “Using Connector/J with J2EE and Other Java Frameworks”. However, the authoritative source for JDBC connection pool configuration information for your particular application server is the documentation for that application server.

If you are developing servlets or JSPs, and your application server is J2EE-compliant, you can put the driver's .jar file in the WEB-INF/lib subdirectory of your webapp, as this is a standard location for third party class libraries in J2EE web applications.

You can also use the MysqlDataSource or MysqlConnectionPoolDataSource classes in the com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional package, if your J2EE application server supports or requires them. Starting with Connector/J 5.0.0, the javax.sql.XADataSource interface is implemented via the com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlXADataSource class, which supports XA distributed transactions when used in combination with MySQL server version 5.0.

The various MysqlDataSource classes support the following parameters (through standard set mutators):

  • user

  • password

  • serverName (see the previous section about fail-over hosts)

  • databaseName

  • port

23.4.2.3. Upgrading from an Older Version

MySQL AB tries to keep the upgrade process as easy as possible, however as is the case with any software, sometimes changes need to be made in new versions to support new features, improve existing functionality, or comply with new standards.

This section has information about what users who are upgrading from one version of Connector/J to another (or to a new version of the MySQL server, with respect to JDBC functionality) should be aware of.

23.4.2.3.1. Upgrading from MySQL Connector/J 3.0 to 3.1

Connector/J 3.1 is designed to be backward-compatible with Connector/J 3.0 as much as possible. Major changes are isolated to new functionality exposed in MySQL-4.1 and newer, which includes Unicode character sets, server-side prepared statements, SQLState codes returned in error messages by the server and various performance enhancements that can be enabled or disabled via configuration properties.

  • Unicode Character Sets — See the next section, as well as Chapter 10, Character Set Support, for information on this new feature of MySQL. 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 via 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 can not 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 allowable values are:

    • exception (the default), which throws an SQLException with an SQLState of S1009.

    • convertToNull, which returns NULL instead of the date.

    • round, which rounds the date to the nearest closest value which is 0001-01-01.

    Starting with Connector/J 3.1.7, ResultSet.getString() can be decoupled from this behavior via noDatetimeStringSync=true (the default value is false) so that you can get retrieve the unaltered all-zero value as a String. It should be noted 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. BLOBs have no character set, so they can't 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 don't ship the .class files unbundled, they are only available in the JAR archives that ship with the driver.

    You should not use the debug build of the driver unless instructed to do so when reporting a problem or bug to MySQL AB, 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.

23.4.2.3.2. JDBC-Specific Issues When Upgrading to MySQL Server 4.1 or Newer
  • Using the UTF-8 Character Encoding - Prior to MySQL server version 4.1, the UTF-8 character encoding was not supported by the server, however the JDBC driver could use it, allowing storage of multiple character sets in latin1 tables on the server.

    Starting with MySQL-4.1, this functionality is deprecated. If you have applications that rely on this functionality, and can not upgrade them to use the official Unicode character support in MySQL server version 4.1 or newer, you should add the following property to your connection URL:

    useOldUTF8Behavior=true

  • 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). 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 following connection property:

    useServerPrepStmts=false

23.4.2.4. Installing from the Development Source Tree

Caution

You should read this section only if you are interested in helping us test our new code. If you just want to get MySQL Connector/J up and running on your system, you should use a standard release distribution.

To install MySQL Connector/J from the development source tree, make sure that you have the following prerequisites:

  • Subversion, to check out the sources from our repository (available from http://subversion.tigris.org/).

  • Apache Ant version 1.6 or newer (available from http://ant.apache.org/).

  • JDK-1.4.2 or later. Although MySQL Connector/J can be installed on older JDKs, to compile it from source you must have at least JDK-1.4.2.

The Subversion source code repository for MySQL Connector/J is located at http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/connector-j. In general, you should not check out the entire repository because it contains every branch and tag for MySQL Connector/J and is quite large.

To check out and compile a specific branch of MySQL Connector/J, follow these steps:

  1. At the time of this writing, there are three active branches of Connector/J: branch_3_0, branch_3_1 and branch_5_0. Check out the latest code from the branch that you want with the following command (replacing [major] and [minor] with appropriate version numbers):

    shell> svn co »
    http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/connector-j/branches/branch_[major]_[minor]/connector-j

    This creates a connector-j subdirectory in the current directory that contains the latest sources for the requested branch.

  2. Change location to the connector-j directory to make it your current working directory:

    shell> cd connector-j
  3. Issue the following command to compile the driver and create a .jar file suitable for installation:

    shell> ant dist

    This creates a build directory in the current directory, where all build output will go. A directory is created in the build directory that includes the version number of the sources you are building from. This directory contains the sources, compiled .class files, and a .jar file suitable for deployment. For other possible targets, including ones that will create a fully packaged distribution, issue the following command:

    shell> ant --projecthelp
  4. A newly created .jar file containing the JDBC driver will be placed in the directory build/mysql-connector-java-[version].

    Install the newly created JDBC driver as you would a binary .jar file that you download from MySQL by following the instructions in Section 23.4.2.2, “Installing the Driver and Configuring the CLASSPATH.

23.4.3. Connector/J Examples

Examples of using Connector/J are located throughout this document, this section provides a summary and links to these examples.

23.4.4. Connector/J (JDBC) Reference

This section of the manual contains reference material for MySQL Connector/J, some of which is automatically generated during the Connector/J build process.

23.4.4.1. Driver/Datasource Class Names, URL Syntax and Configuration Properties for Connector/J

The name of the class that implements java.sql.Driver in MySQL Connector/J is com.mysql.jdbc.Driver. The org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver class name is also usable to remain backward-compatible with MM.MySQL. You should use this class name when registering the driver, or when otherwise configuring software to use MySQL Connector/J.

The JDBC URL format for MySQL Connector/J is as follows, with items in square brackets ([, ]) being optional:

jdbc:mysql://[host][,failoverhost...][:port]/[database] »
[?propertyName1][=propertyValue1][&propertyName2][=propertyValue2]...

If the hostname is not specified, it defaults to 127.0.0.1. If the port is not specified, it defaults to 3306, the default port number for MySQL servers.

jdbc:mysql://[host:port],[host:port].../[database] »
[?propertyName1][=propertyValue1][&propertyName2][=propertyValue2]...

If the database is not specified, the connection will be made with no default database. In this case, you will need to either call the setCatalog() method on the Connection instance or fully-specify table names using the database name (i.e. SELECT dbname.tablename.colname FROM dbname.tablename...) in your SQL. Not specifying the database to use upon connection is generally only useful when building tools that work with multiple databases, such as GUI database managers.

MySQL Connector/J has fail-over support. This allows the driver to fail-over to any number of slave hosts and still perform read-only queries. Fail-over only happens when the connection is in an autoCommit(true) state, because fail-over can not happen reliably when a transaction is in progress. Most application servers and connection pools set autoCommit to true at the end of every transaction/connection use.

The fail-over functionality has the following behavior:

  • If the URL property autoReconnect is false: Failover only happens at connection initialization, and failback occurs when the driver determines that the first host has become available again.

  • If the URL property autoReconnect is true: Failover happens when the driver determines that the connection has failed (before every query), and falls back to the first host when it determines that the host has become available again (after queriesBeforeRetryMaster queries have been issued).

In either case, whenever you are connected to a "failed-over" server, the connection will be set to read-only state, so queries that would modify data will have exceptions thrown (the query will never be processed by the MySQL server).

Configuration properties define how Connector/J will make a connection to a MySQL server. Unless otherwise noted, properties can be set for a DataSource object or for a Connection object.

Configuration Properties can be set in one of the following ways:

  • Using the set*() methods on MySQL implementations of java.sql.DataSource (which is the preferred method when using implementations of java.sql.DataSource):

    • com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource

    • com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlConnectionPoolDataSource

  • As a key/value pair in the java.util.Properties instance passed to DriverManager.getConnection() or Driver.connect()

  • As a JDBC URL parameter in the URL given to java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(), java.sql.Driver.connect() or the MySQL implementations of the javax.sql.DataSource setURL() method.

    Note

    If the mechanism you use to configure a JDBC URL is XML-based, you will need to use the XML character literal & to separate configuration parameters, as the ampersand is a reserved character for XML.

The properties are listed in the following tables.

Connection/Authentication. 

Property Name Definition Default Value Since Version
userThe user to connect as all versions
passwordThe password to use when connecting all versions
socketFactoryThe name of the class that the driver should use for creating socket connections to the server. This class must implement the interface 'com.mysql.jdbc.SocketFactory' and have public no-args constructor.com.mysql.jdbc.StandardSocketFactory3.0.3
connectTimeoutTimeout for socket connect (in milliseconds), with 0 being no timeout. Only works on JDK-1.4 or newer. Defaults to '0'.03.0.1
socketTimeoutTimeout on network socket operations (0, the default means no timeout).03.0.1
useConfigsLoad the comma-delimited list of configuration properties before parsing the URL or applying user-specified properties. These configurations are explained in the 'Configurations' of the documentation. 3.1.5
interactiveClientSet the CLIENT_INTERACTIVE flag, which tells MySQL to timeout connections based on INTERACTIVE_TIMEOUT instead of WAIT_TIMEOUTfalse3.1.0
localSocketAddressHostname or IP address given to explicitly configure the interface that the driver will bind the client side of the TCP/IP connection to when connecting. 5.0.5
propertiesTransformAn implementation of com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionPropertiesTransform that the driver will use to modify URL properties passed to the driver before attempting a connection 3.1.4
useCompressionUse zlib compression when communicating with the server (true/false)? Defaults to 'false'.false3.0.17

Networking. 

Property Name Definition Default Value Since Version
tcpKeepAliveIf connecting using TCP/IP, should the driver set SO_KEEPALIVE?true5.0.7
tcpNoDelayIf connecting using TCP/IP, should the driver set SO_TCP_NODELAY (disabling the Nagle Algorithm)?true5.0.7
tcpRcvBufIf connecting using TCP/IP, should the driver set SO_RCV_BUF to the given value? The default value of '0', means use the platform default value for this property)05.0.7
tcpSndBufIf connecting using TCP/IP, shuold the driver set SO_SND_BUF to the given value? The default value of '0', means use the platform default value for this property)05.0.7
tcpTrafficClassIf connecting using TCP/IP, should the driver set traffic class or type-of-service fields ?See the documentation for java.net.Socket.setTrafficClass() for more information.05.0.7

High Availability and Clustering. 

Property Name Definition Default Value Since Version
autoReconnectShould the driver try to re-establish stale and/or dead connections? If enabled the driver will throw an exception for a queries issued on a stale or dead connection, which belong to the current transaction, but will attempt reconnect before the next query issued on the connection in a new transaction. The use of this feature is not recommended, because it has side effects related to session state and data consistency when applications don't handle SQLExceptions properly, and is only designed to be used when you are unable to configure your application to handle SQLExceptions resulting from dead and stale connections properly. Alternatively, investigate setting the MySQL server variable "wait_timeout" to some high value rather than the default of 8 hours.false1.1
autoReconnectForPoolsUse a reconnection strategy appropriate for connection pools (defaults to 'false')false3.1.3
failOverReadOnlyWhen failing over in autoReconnect mode, should the connection be set to 'read-only'?true3.0.12
maxReconnectsMaximum number of reconnects to attempt if autoReconnect is true, default is '3'.31.1
reconnectAtTxEndIf autoReconnect is set to true, should the driver attempt reconnections at the end of every transaction?false3.0.10
initialTimeoutIf autoReconnect is enabled, the initial time to wait between re-connect attempts (in seconds, defaults to '2').21.1
roundRobinLoadBalanceWhen autoReconnect is enabled, and failoverReadonly is false, should we pick hosts to connect to on a round-robin basis?false3.1.2
queriesBeforeRetryMasterNumber of queries to issue before falling back to master when failed over (when using multi-host failover). Whichever condition is met first, 'queriesBeforeRetryMaster' or 'secondsBeforeRetryMaster' will cause an attempt to be made to reconnect to the master. Defaults to 50.503.0.2
secondsBeforeRetryMasterHow long should the driver wait, when failed over, before attempting303.0.2
resourceIdA globally unique name that identifies the resource that this datasource or connection is connected to, used for XAResource.isSameRM() when the driver can't determine this value based on hostnames used in the URL 5.0.1

Security. 

Property Name Definition Default Value Since Version
allowMultiQueriesAllow the use of ';' to delimit multiple queries during one statement (true/false), defaults to 'false'false3.1.1
useSSLUse SSL when communicating with the server (true/false), defaults to 'false'false3.0.2
requireSSLRequire SSL connection if useSSL=true? (defaults to 'false').false3.1.0
allowLoadLocalInfileShould the driver allow use of 'LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE...' (defaults to 'true').true3.0.3
allowUrlInLocalInfileShould the driver allow URLs in 'LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE' statements?false3.1.4
clientCertificateKeyStorePasswordPassword for the client certificates KeyStore 5.1.0
clientCertificateKeyStoreTypeKeyStore type for client certificates (NULL or empty means use default, standard keystore types supported by the JVM are "JKS" and "PKCS12", your environment may have more available depending on what security products are installed and available to the JVM. 5.1.0
clientCertificateKeyStoreUrlURL to the client certificate KeyStore (if not specified, use defaults) 5.1.0
trustCertificateKeyStorePasswordPassword for the trusted root certificates KeyStore 5.1.0
trustCertificateKeyStoreTypeKeyStore type for trusted root certificates (NULL or empty means use default, standard keystore types supported by the JVM are "JKS" and "PKCS12", your environment may have more available depending on what security products are installed and available to the JVM. 5.1.0
trustCertificateKeyStoreUrlURL to the trusted root certificate KeyStore (if not specified, use defaults) 5.1.0
paranoidTake measures to prevent exposure sensitive information in error messages and clear data structures holding sensitive data when possible? (defaults to 'false')false3.0.1

Performance Extensions. 

Property Name Definition Default Value Since Version
callableStmtCacheSizeIf 'cacheCallableStmts' is enabled, how many callable statements should be cached?1003.1.2
metadataCacheSizeThe number of queries to cache ResultSetMetadata for if cacheResultSetMetaData is set to 'true' (default 50)503.1.1
prepStmtCacheSizeIf prepared statement caching is enabled, how many prepared statements should be cached?253.0.10
prepStmtCacheSqlLimitIf prepared statement caching is enabled, what's the largest SQL the driver will cache the parsing for?2563.0.10
alwaysSendSetIsolationShould the driver always communicate with the database when Connection.setTransactionIsolation() is called? If set to false, the driver will only communicate with the database when the requested transaction isolation is different than the whichever is newer, the last value that was set via Connection.setTransactionIsolation(), or the value that was read from the server when the connection was established.true3.1.7
maintainTimeStatsShould the driver maintain various internal timers to enable idle time calculations as well as more verbose error messages when the connection to the server fails? Setting this property to false removes at least two calls to System.getCurrentTimeMillis() per query.true3.1.9
useCursorFetchIf connected to MySQL > 5.0.2, and setFetchSize() > 0 on a statement, should that statement use cursor-based fetching to retrieve rows?false5.0.0
blobSendChunkSizeChunk to use when sending BLOB/CLOBs via ServerPreparedStatements10485763.1.9
cacheCallableStmtsShould the driver cache the parsing stage of CallableStatementsfalse3.1.2
cachePrepStmtsShould the driver cache the parsing stage of PreparedStatements of client-side prepared statements, the "check" for suitability of server-side prepared and server-side prepared statements themselves?false3.0.10
cacheResultSetMetadataShould the driver cache ResultSetMetaData for Statements and PreparedStatements? (Req. JDK-1.4+, true/false, default 'false')false3.1.1
cacheServerConfigurationShould the driver cache the results of 'SHOW VARIABLES' and 'SHOW COLLATION' on a per-URL basis?false3.1.5
defaultFetchSizeThe driver will call setFetchSize(n) with this value on all newly-created Statements03.1.9
dontTrackOpenResourcesThe JDBC specification requires the driver to automatically track and close resources, however if your application doesn't do a good job of explicitly calling close() on statements or result sets, this can cause memory leakage. Setting this property to true relaxes this constraint, and can be more memory efficient for some applications.false3.1.7
dynamicCalendarsShould the driver retrieve the default calendar when required, or cache it per connection/session?false3.1.5
elideSetAutoCommitsIf using MySQL-4.1 or newer, should the driver only issue 'set autocommit=n' queries when the server's state doesn't match the requested state by Connection.setAutoCommit(boolean)?false3.1.3
enableQueryTimeoutsWhen enabled, query timeouts set via Statement.setQueryTimeout() use a shared java.util.Timer instance for scheduling. Even if the timeout doesn't expire before the query is processed, there will be memory used by the TimerTask for the given timeout which won't be reclaimed until the time the timeout would have expired if it hadn't been cancelled by the driver. High-load environments might want to consider disabling this functionality.true5.0.6
holdResultsOpenOverStatementCloseShould the driver close result sets on Statement.close() as required by the JDBC specification?false3.1.7
largeRowSizeThresholdWhat size result set row should the JDBC driver consider "large", and thus use a more memory-efficient way of representing the row internally?20485.1.1
loadBalanceStrategyIf using a load-balanced connection to connect to SQL nodes in a MySQL Cluster/NDB configuration (by using the URL prefix "jdbc:mysql:loadbalance://"), which load balancin algorithm should the driver use: (1) "random" - the driver will pick a random host for each request. This tends to work better than round-robin, as the randomness will somewhat account for spreading loads where requests vary in response time, while round-robin can sometimes lead to overloaded nodes if there are variations in response times across the workload. (2) "bestResponseTime" - the driver will route the request to the host that had the best response time for the previous transaction.random5.0.6
locatorFetchBufferSizeIf 'emulateLocators' is configured to 'true', what size buffer should be used when fetching BLOB data for getBinaryInputStream?10485763.2.1
rewriteBatchedStatementsShould the driver use multiqueries (irregardless of the setting of "allowMultiQueries") as well as rewriting of prepared statements for INSERT into multi-value inserts when executeBatch() is called? Notice that this has the potential for SQL injection if using plain java.sql.Statements and your code doesn't sanitize input correctly. Notice that for prepared statements, server-side prepared statements can not currently take advantage of this rewrite option, and that if you don't specify stream lengths when using PreparedStatement.set*Stream(), the driver won't be able to determine the optimium number of parameters per batch and you might receive an error from the driver that the resultant packet is too large. Statement.getGeneratedKeys() for these rewritten statements only works when the entire batch includes INSERT statements.false3.1.13
useDirectRowUnpackUse newer result set row unpacking code that skips a copy from network buffers to a MySQL packet instance and instead reads directly into the result set row data buffers.true5.1.1
useDynamicCharsetInfoShould the driver use a per-connection cache of character set information queried from the server when necessary, or use a built-in static mapping that is more efficient, but isn't aware of custom character sets or character sets implemented after the release of the JDBC driver?true5.0.6
useFastDateParsingUse internal String->Date/Time/Teimstamp conversion routines to avoid excessive object creation?true5.0.5
useFastIntParsingUse internal String->Integer conversion routines to avoid excessive object creation?true3.1.4
useJvmCharsetConvertersAlways use the character encoding routines built into the JVM, rather than using lookup tables for single-byte character sets?false5.0.1
useLocalSessionStateShould the driver refer to the internal values of autocommit and transaction isolation that are set by Connection.setAutoCommit() and Connection.setTransactionIsolation() and transaction state as maintained by the protocol, rather than querying the database or blindly sending commands to the database for commit() or rollback() method calls?false3.1.7
useReadAheadInputUse newer, optimized non-blocking, buffered input stream when reading from the server?true3.1.5

Debugging/Profiling. 

Property Name Definition Default Value Since Version
loggerThe name of a class that implements "com.mysql.jdbc.log.Log" that will be used to log messages to. (default is "com.mysql.jdbc.log.StandardLogger", which logs to STDERR)com.mysql.jdbc.log.StandardLogger3.1.1
gatherPerfMetricsShould the driver gather performance metrics, and report them via the configured logger every 'reportMetricsIntervalMillis' milliseconds?false3.1.2
profileSQLTrace queries and their execution/fetch times to the configured logger (true/false) defaults to 'false'false3.1.0
profileSqlDeprecated, use 'profileSQL' instead. Trace queries and their execution/fetch times on STDERR (true/false) defaults to 'false' 2.0.14
reportMetricsIntervalMillisIf 'gatherPerfMetrics' is enabled, how often should they be logged (in ms)?300003.1.2
maxQuerySizeToLogControls the maximum length/size of a query that will get logged when profiling or tracing20483.1.3
packetDebugBufferSizeThe maximum number of packets to retain when 'enablePacketDebug' is true203.1.3
slowQueryThresholdMillisIf 'logSlowQueries' is enabled, how long should a query (in ms) before it is logged as 'slow'?20003.1.2
slowQueryThresholdNanosIf 'useNanosForElapsedTime' is set to true, and this property is set to a non-zero value, the driver will use this threshold (in nanosecond units) to determine if a query was slow.05.0.7
useUsageAdvisorShould the driver issue 'usage' warnings advising proper and efficient usage of JDBC and MySQL Connector/J to the log (true/false, defaults to 'false')?false3.1.1
autoGenerateTestcaseScriptShould the driver dump the SQL it is executing, including server-side prepared statements to STDERR?false3.1.9
clientInfoProviderThe name of a class that implements the com.mysql.jdbc.JDBC4ClientInfoProvider interface in order to support JDBC-4.0's Connection.get/setClientInfo() methodscom.mysql.jdbc.JDBC4CommentClientInfoProvider5.1.0
dumpMetadataOnColumnNotFoundShould the driver dump the field-level metadata of a result set into the exception message when ResultSet.findColumn() fails?false3.1.13
dumpQueriesOnExceptionShould the driver dump the contents of the query sent to the server in the message for SQLExceptions?false3.1.3
enablePacketDebugWhen enabled, a ring-buffer of 'packetDebugBufferSize' packets will be kept, and dumped when exceptions are thrown in key areas in the driver's codefalse3.1.3
explainSlowQueriesIf 'logSlowQueries' is enabled, should the driver automatically issue an 'EXPLAIN' on the server and send the results to the configured log at a WARN level?false3.1.2
logSlowQueriesShould queries that take longer than 'slowQueryThresholdMillis' be logged?false3.1.2
logXaCommandsShould the driver log XA commands sent by MysqlXaConnection to the server, at the DEBUG level of logging?false5.0.5
resultSetSizeThresholdIf the usage advisor is enabled, how many rows should a result set contain before the driver warns that it is suspiciously large?1005.0.5
traceProtocolShould trace-level network protocol be logged?false3.1.2
useNanosForElapsedTimeFor profiling/debugging functionality that measures elapsed time, should the driver try to use nanoseconds resolution if available (JDK >= 1.5)?false5.0.7

Miscellaneous. 

Property Name Definition Default Value Since Version
useUnicodeShould the driver use Unicode character encodings when handling strings? Should only be used when the driver can't determine the character set mapping, or you are trying to 'force' the driver to use a character set that MySQL either doesn't natively support (such as UTF-8), true/false, defaults to 'true'true1.1g
characterEncodingIf 'useUnicode' is set to true, what character encoding should the driver use when dealing with strings? (defaults is to 'autodetect') 1.1g
characterSetResultsCharacter set to tell the server to return results as. 3.0.13
connectionCollationIf set, tells the server to use this collation via 'set collation_connection' 3.0.13
sessionVariablesA comma-separated list of name/value pairs to be sent as SET SESSION ... to the server when the driver connects. 3.1.8
allowNanAndInfShould the driver allow NaN or +/- INF values in PreparedStatement.setDouble()?false3.1.5
autoClosePStmtStreamsShould the driver automatically call .close() on streams/readers passed as arguments via set*() methods?false3.1.12
autoDeserializeShould the driver automatically detect and de-serialize objects stored in BLOB fields?false3.1.5
capitalizeTypeNamesCapitalize type names in DatabaseMetaData? (usually only useful when using WebObjects, true/false, defaults to 'false')false2.0.7
clobCharacterEncodingThe character encoding to use for sending and retrieving TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT and LONGTEXT values instead of the configured connection characterEncoding 5.0.0
clobberStreamingResultsThis will cause a 'streaming' ResultSet to be automatically closed, and any outstanding data still streaming from the server to be discarded if another query is executed before all the data has been read from the server.false3.0.9
continueBatchOnErrorShould the driver continue processing batch commands if one statement fails. The JDBC spec allows either way (defaults to 'true').true3.0.3
createDatabaseIfNotExistCreates the database given in the URL if it doesn't yet exist. Assumes the configured user has permissions to create databases.false3.1.9
emptyStringsConvertToZeroShould the driver allow conversions from empty string fields to numeric values of '0'?true3.1.8
emulateLocatorsShould the driver emulate java.sql.Blobs with locators? With this feature enabled, the driver will delay loading the actual Blob data until the one of the retrieval methods (getInputStream(), getBytes(), and so forth) on the blob data stream has been accessed. For this to work, you must use a column alias with the value of the column to the actual name of the Blob. The feature also has the following restrictions: The SELECT that created the result set must reference only one table, the table must have a primary key; the SELECT must alias the original blob column name, specified as a string, to an alternate name; the SELECT must cover all columns that make up the primary key.false3.1.0
emulateUnsupportedPstmtsShould the driver detect prepared statements that are not supported by the server, and replace them with client-side emulated versions?true3.1.7
generateSimpleParameterMetadataShould the driver generate simplified parameter metadata for PreparedStatements when no metadata is available either because the server couldn't support preparing the statement, or server-side prepared statements are disabled?false5.0.5
ignoreNonTxTablesIgnore non-transactional table warning for rollback? (defaults to 'false').false3.0.9
jdbcCompliantTruncationShould the driver throw java.sql.DataTruncation exceptions when data is truncated as is required by the JDBC specification when connected to a server that supports warnings (MySQL 4.1.0 and newer)?true3.1.2
maxRowsThe maximum number of rows to return (0, the default means return all rows).-1all versions
netTimeoutForStreamingResultsWhat value should the driver automatically set the server setting 'net_write_timeout' to when the streaming result sets feature is in use? (value has unit of seconds, the value '0' means the driver will not try and adjust this value)6005.1.0
noAccessToProcedureBodiesWhen determining procedure parameter types for CallableStatements, and the connected user can't access procedure bodies through "SHOW CREATE PROCEDURE" or select on mysql.proc should the driver instead create basic metadata (all parameters reported as INOUT VARCHARs) instead of throwing an exception?false5.0.3
noDatetimeStringSyncDon't ensure that ResultSet.getDatetimeType().toString().equals(ResultSet.getString())false3.1.7
noTimezoneConversionForTimeTypeDon't convert TIME values using the server timezone if 'useTimezone'='true'false5.0.0
nullCatalogMeansCurrentWhen DatabaseMetadataMethods ask for a 'catalog' parameter, does the value null mean use the current catalog? (this is not JDBC-compliant, but follows legacy behavior from earlier versions of the driver)true3.1.8
nullNamePatternMatchesAllShould DatabaseMetaData methods that accept *pattern parameters treat null the same as '%' (this is not JDBC-compliant, however older versions of the driver accepted this departure from the specification)true3.1.8
overrideSupportsIntegrityEnhancementFacilityShould the driver return "true" for DatabaseMetaData.supportsIntegrityEnhancementFacility() even if the database doesn't support it to workaround applications that require this method to return "true" to signal support of foreign keys, even though the SQL specification states that this facility contains much more than just foreign key support (one such application being OpenOffice)?false3.1.12
padCharsWithSpaceIf a result set column has the CHAR type and the value does not fill the amount of characters specified in the DDL for the column, should the driver pad the remaining characters with space (for ANSI compliance)?false5.0.6
pedanticFollow the JDBC spec to the letter.false3.0.0
pinGlobalTxToPhysicalConnectionWhen using XAConnections, should the driver ensure that operations on a given XID are always routed to the same physical connection? This allows the XAConnection to support "XA START ... JOIN" after "XA END" has been calledfalse5.0.1
populateInsertRowWithDefaultValuesWhen using ResultSets that are CONCUR_UPDATABLE, should the driver pre-poulate the "insert" row with default values from the DDL for the table used in the query so those values are immediately available for ResultSet accessors? This functionality requires a call to the database for metadata each time a result set of this type is created. If disabled (the default), the default values will be populated by the an internal call to refreshRow() which pulls back default values and/or values changed by triggers.false5.0.5
processEscapeCodesForPrepStmtsShould the driver process escape codes in queries that are prepared?true3.1.12
relaxAutoCommitIf the version of MySQL the driver connects to does not support transactions, still allow calls to commit(), rollback() and setAutoCommit() (true/false, defaults to 'false')?false2.0.13
retainStatementAfterResultSetCloseShould the driver retain the Statement reference in a ResultSet after ResultSet.close() has been called. This is not JDBC-compliant after JDBC-4.0.false3.1.11
rollbackOnPooledCloseShould the driver issue a rollback() when the logical connection in a pool is closed?true3.0.15
runningCTS13Enables workarounds for bugs in Sun's JDBC compliance testsuite version 1.3false3.1.7
serverTimezoneOverride detection/mapping of timezone. Used when timezone from server doesn't map to Java timezone 3.0.2
statementInterceptorsA comma-delimited list of classes that implement "" that should be placed "in between" query execution to influence the results. StatementInterceptors are "chainable", the results returned by the "current" interceptor will be passed on to the next in in the chain, from left-to-right order, as specified in this property. 5.1.1
strictFloatingPointUsed only in older versions of compliance testfalse3.0.0
strictUpdatesShould the driver do strict checking (all primary keys selected) of updatable result sets (true, false, defaults to 'true')?true3.0.4
tinyInt1isBitShould the driver treat the datatype TINYINT(1) as the BIT type (because the server silently converts BIT -> TINYINT(1) when creating tables)?true3.0.16
transformedBitIsBooleanIf the driver converts TINYINT(1) to a different type, should it use BOOLEAN instead of BIT for future compatibility with MySQL-5.0, as MySQL-5.0 has a BIT type?false3.1.9
treatUtilDateAsTimestampShould the driver treat java.util.Date as a TIMESTAMP for the purposes of PreparedStatement.setObject()?true5.0.5
ultraDevHackCreate PreparedStatements for prepareCall() when required, because UltraDev is broken and issues a prepareCall() for _all_ statements? (true/false, defaults to 'false')false2.0.3
useGmtMillisForDatetimesConvert between session timezone and GMT before creating Date and Timestamp instances (value of "false" is legacy behavior, "true" leads to more JDBC-compliant behavior.false3.1.12
useHostsInPrivilegesAdd '@hostname' to users in DatabaseMetaData.getColumn/TablePrivileges() (true/false), defaults to 'true'.true3.0.2
useInformationSchemaWhen connected to MySQL-5.0.7 or newer, should the driver use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA to derive information used by DatabaseMetaData?false5.0.0
useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShiftShould the driver use JDBC-compliant rules when converting TIME/TIMESTAMP/DATETIME values' timezone information for those JDBC arguments which take a java.util.Calendar argument? (Notice that this option is exclusive of the "useTimezone=true" configuration option.)false5.0.0
useOldAliasMetadataBehaviorShould the driver use the legacy behavior for "AS" clauses on columns and tables, and only return aliases (if any) for ResultSetMetaData.getColumnName() or ResultSetMetaData.getTableName() rather than the original column/table name?false5.0.4
useOldUTF8BehaviorUse the UTF-8 behavior the driver did when communicating with 4.0 and older serversfalse3.1.6
useOnlyServerErrorMessagesDon't prepend 'standard' SQLState error messages to error messages returned by the server.true3.0.15
useSSPSCompatibleTimezoneShiftIf migrating from an environment that was using server-side prepared statements, and the configuration property "useJDBCCompliantTimeZoneShift" set to "true", use compatible behavior when not using server-side prepared statements when sending TIMESTAMP values to the MySQL server.false5.0.5
useServerPrepStmtsUse server-side prepared statements if the server supports them?false3.1.0
useSqlStateCodesUse SQL Standard state codes instead of 'legacy' X/Open/SQL state codes (true/false), default is 'true'true3.1.3
useStreamLengthsInPrepStmtsHonor stream length parameter in PreparedStatement/ResultSet.setXXXStream() method calls (true/false, defaults to 'true')?true3.0.2
useTimezoneConvert time/date types between client and server timezones (true/false, defaults to 'false')?false3.0.2
useUnbufferedInputDon't use BufferedInputStream for reading data from the servertrue3.0.11
yearIsDateTypeShould the JDBC driver treat the MySQL type "YEAR" as a java.sql.Date, or as a SHORT?true3.1.9
zeroDateTimeBehaviorWhat should happen when the driver encounters DATETIME values that are composed entirely of zeroes (used by MySQL to represent invalid dates)? Valid values are "exception", "round" and "convertToNull".exception3.1.4

Connector/J also supports access to MySQL via named pipes on Windows NT/2000/XP using the NamedPipeSocketFactory as a plugin-socket factory via the socketFactory property. If you don't use a namedPipePath property, the default of '\\.\pipe\MySQL' will be used. If you use the NamedPipeSocketFactory, the hostname and port number values in the JDBC url will be ignored. You can enable this feature using:

socketFactory=com.mysql.jdbc.NamedPipeSocketFactory

Named pipes only work when connecting to a MySQL server on the same physical machine as the one the JDBC driver is being used on. In simple performance tests, it appears that named pipe access is between 30%-50% faster than the standard TCP/IP access.

You can create your own socket factories by following the example code in com.mysql.jdbc.NamedPipeSocketFactory, or com.mysql.jdbc.StandardSocketFactory.

23.4.4.2. JDBC API Implementation Notes

MySQL Connector/J passes all of the tests in the publicly-available version of Sun's JDBC compliance test suite. However, in many places the JDBC specification is vague about how certain functionality should be implemented, or the specification allows leeway in implementation.

This section gives details on a interface-by-interface level about how certain implementation decisions may affect how you use MySQL Connector/J.

  • Blob

    Starting with Connector/J version 3.1.0, you can emulate Blobs with locators by adding the property 'emulateLocators=true' to your JDBC URL. Using this method, the driver will delay loading the actual Blob data until you retrieve the other data and then use retrieval methods (getInputStream(), getBytes(), and so forth) on the blob data stream.

    For this to work, you must use a column alias with the value of the column to the actual name of the Blob, for example:

    SELECT id, 'data' as blob_data from blobtable

    For this to work, you must also follow follow these rules:

    • The SELECT must also reference only one table, the table must have a primary key.

    • The SELECT must alias the original blob column name, specified as a string, to an alternate name.

    • The SELECT must cover all columns that make up the primary key.

    The Blob implementation does not allow in-place modification (they are copies, as reported by the DatabaseMetaData.locatorsUpdateCopies() method). Because of this, you should use the corresponding PreparedStatement.setBlob() or ResultSet.updateBlob() (in the case of updatable result sets) methods to save changes back to the database.

    MySQL Enterprise.  MySQL Enterprise subscribers will find more information about type conversion in the Knowledge Base article, Type Conversions Supported by MySQL Connector/J. To subscribe to MySQL Enterprise see http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/advisors.html.

  • CallableStatement

    Starting with Connector/J 3.1.1, stored procedures are supported when connecting to MySQL version 5.0 or newer via the CallableStatement interface. Currently, the getParameterMetaData() method of CallableStatement is not supported.

  • Clob

    The Clob implementation does not allow in-place modification (they are copies, as reported by the DatabaseMetaData.locatorsUpdateCopies() method). Because of this, you should use the PreparedStatement.setClob() method to save changes back to the database. The JDBC API does not have a ResultSet.updateClob() method.

  • Connection

    Unlike older versions of MM.MySQL the isClosed() method does not ping the server to determine if it is alive. In accordance with the JDBC specification, it only returns true if closed() has been called on the connection. If you need to determine if the connection is still valid, you should issue a simple query, such as SELECT 1. The driver will throw an exception if the connection is no longer valid.

  • DatabaseMetaData

    Foreign Key information (getImportedKeys()/getExportedKeys() and getCrossReference()) is only available from InnoDB tables. However, the driver uses SHOW CREATE TABLE to retrieve this information, so when other storage engines support foreign keys, the driver will transparently support them as well.

  • PreparedStatement

    PreparedStatements are implemented by the driver, as MySQL does not have a prepared statement feature. Because of this, the driver does not implement getParameterMetaData() or getMetaData() as it would require the driver to have a complete SQL parser in the client.

    Starting with version 3.1.0 MySQL Connector/J, server-side prepared statements and binary-encoded result sets are used when the server supports them.

    Take care when using a server-side prepared statement with large parameters that are set via setBinaryStream(), setAsciiStream(), setUnicodeStream(), setBlob(), or setClob(). If you want to re-execute the statement with any large parameter changed to a non-large parameter, it is necessary to call clearParameters() and set all parameters again. The reason for this is as follows:

    • During both server-side prepared statements and client-side emulation, large data is exchanged only when PreparedStatement.execute() is called.

    • Once that has been done, the stream used to read the data on the client side is closed (as per the JDBC spec), and can't be read from again.

    • If a parameter changes from large to non-large, the driver must reset the server-side state of the prepared statement to allow the parameter that is being changed to take the place of the prior large value. This removes all of the large data that has already been sent to the server, thus requiring the data to be re-sent, via the setBinaryStream(), setAsciiStream(), setUnicodeStream(), setBlob() or setClob() methods.

    Consequently, if you want to change the type of a parameter to a non-large one, you must call clearParameters() and set all parameters of the prepared statement again before it can be re-executed.

  • ResultSet

    By default, ResultSets are completely retrieved and stored in memory. In most cases this is the most efficient way to operate, and due to the design of the MySQL network protocol is easier to implement. If you are working with ResultSets that have a large number of rows or large values, and can not allocate heap space in your JVM for the memory required, you can tell the driver to stream the results back one row at a time.

    To enable this functionality, you need to create a Statement instance in the following manner:

    stmt = conn.createStatement(java.sql.ResultSet.TYPE_FORWARD_ONLY,
                  java.sql.ResultSet.CONCUR_READ_ONLY);
    stmt.setFetchSize(Integer.MIN_VALUE);

    The combination of a forward-only, read-only result set, with a fetch size of Integer.MIN_VALUE serves as a signal to the driver to stream result sets row-by-row. After this any result sets created with the statement will be retrieved row-by-row.

    There are some caveats with this approach. You will have to read all of the rows in the result set (or close it) before you can issue any other queries on the connection, or an exception will be thrown.

    The earliest the locks these statements hold can be released (whether they be MyISAM table-level locks or row-level locks in some other storage engine such as InnoDB) is when the statement completes.

    If the statement is within scope of a transaction, then locks are released when the transaction completes (which implies that the statement needs to complete first). As with most other databases, statements are not complete until all the results pending on the statement are read or the active result set for the statement is closed.

    Therefore, if using streaming results, you should process them as quickly as possible if you want to maintain concurrent access to the tables referenced by the statement producing the result set.

  • ResultSetMetaData

    The isAutoIncrement() method only works when using MySQL servers 4.0 and newer.

  • Statement

    When using versions of the JDBC driver earlier than 3.2.1, and connected to server versions earlier than 5.0.3, the setFetchSize() method has no effect, other than to toggle result set streaming as described above.

    Connector/J 5.0.0 and later include support for both Statement.cancel() and Statement.setQueryTimeout(). Both require MySQL 5.0.0 or newer server, and require a separate connection to issue the KILL QUERY statement. In the case of setQueryTimeout(), the implementation creates an additional thread to handle the timeout functionality.

    Note

    Failures to cancel the statement for setQueryTimeout() may manifest themselves as RuntimeException rather than failing silently, as there is currently no way to unblock the thread that is executing the query being cancelled due to timeout expiration and have it throw the exception instead.

    MySQL does not support SQL cursors, and the JDBC driver doesn't emulate them, so "setCursorName()" has no effect.

23.4.4.3. Java, JDBC and MySQL Types

MySQL Connector/J is flexible in the way it handles conversions between MySQL data types and Java data types.

In general, any MySQL data type can be converted to a java.lang.String, and any numerical type can be converted to any of the Java numerical types, although round-off, overflow, or loss of precision may occur.

Starting with Connector/J 3.1.0, the JDBC driver will issue warnings or throw DataTruncation exceptions as is required by the JDBC specification unless the connection was configured not to do so by using the property jdbcCompliantTruncation and setting it to false.

The conversions that are always guaranteed to work are listed in the following table:

Connection Properties - Miscellaneous. 

These MySQL Data TypesCan always be converted to these Java types
CHAR, VARCHAR, BLOB, TEXT, ENUM, and SETjava.lang.String, java.io.InputStream, java.io.Reader, java.sql.Blob, java.sql.Clob
FLOAT, REAL, DOUBLE PRECISION, NUMERIC, DECIMAL, TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INTEGER, BIGINTjava.lang.String, java.lang.Short, java.lang.Integer, java.lang.Long, java.lang.Double, java.math.BigDecimal
DATE, TIME, DATETIME, TIMESTAMPjava.lang.String, java.sql.Date, java.sql.Timestamp

Note

Round-off, overflow or loss of precision may occur if you choose a Java numeric data type that has less precision or capacity than the MySQL data type you are converting to/from.

The ResultSet.getObject() method uses the type conversions between MySQL and Java types, following the JDBC specification where appropriate. The value returned by ResultSetMetaData.GetColumnClassName() is also shown below. For more information on the java.sql.Types classes see Java 2 Platform Types.

MySQL Types to Java Types for ResultSet.getObject(). 

MySQL Type NameReturn value of GetColumnClassNameReturned as Java Class
BIT(1) (new in MySQL-5.0)BITjava.lang.Boolean
BIT( > 1) (new in MySQL-5.0)BITbyte[]
TINYINTTINYINTjava.lang.Boolean if the configuration property tinyInt1isBit is set to true (the default) and the storage size is 1, or java.lang.Integer if not.
BOOL, BOOLEANTINYINTSee TINYINT, above as these are aliases for TINYINT(1), currently.
SMALLINT[(M)] [UNSIGNED]SMALLINT [UNSIGNED]java.lang.Integer (regardless if UNSIGNED or not)
MEDIUMINT[(M)] [UNSIGNED]MEDIUMINT [UNSIGNED]java.lang.Integer, if UNSIGNED java.lang.Long
INT,INTEGER[(M)] [UNSIGNED]INTEGER [UNSIGNED]java.lang.Integer, if UNSIGNED java.lang.Long
BIGINT[(M)] [UNSIGNED]BIGINT [UNSIGNED]java.lang.Long, if UNSIGNED java.math.BigInteger
FLOAT[(M,D)]FLOATjava.lang.Float
DOUBLE[(M,B)]DOUBLEjava.lang.Double
DECIMAL[(M[,D])]DECIMALjava.math.BigDecimal
DATEDATEjava.sql.Date
DATETIMEDATETIMEjava.sql.Timestamp
TIMESTAMP[(M)]TIMESTAMPjava.sql.Timestamp
TIMETIMEjava.sql.Time
YEAR[(2|4)]YEARIf yearIsDateType configuration property is set to false, then the returned object type is java.sql.Short. If set to true (the default) then an object of type java.sql.Date (with the date set to January 1st, at midnight).
CHAR(M)CHARjava.lang.String (unless the character set for the column is BINARY, then byte[] is returned.
VARCHAR(M) [BINARY]VARCHARjava.lang.String (unless the character set for the column is BINARY, then byte[] is returned.
BINARY(M)BINARYbyte[]
VARBINARY(M)VARBINARYbyte[]
TINYBLOBTINYBLOBbyte[]
TINYTEXTVARCHARjava.lang.String
BLOBBLOBbyte[]
TEXTVARCHARjava.lang.String
MEDIUMBLOBMEDIUMBLOBbyte[]
MEDIUMTEXTVARCHARjava.lang.String
LONGBLOBLONGBLOBbyte[]
LONGTEXTVARCHARjava.lang.String
ENUM('value1','value2',...)CHARjava.lang.String
SET('value1','value2',...)CHARjava.lang.String

23.4.4.4. Using Character Sets and Unicode

All strings sent from the JDBC driver to the server are converted automatically from native Java Unicode form to the client character encoding, including all queries sent via Statement.execute(), Statement.executeUpdate(), Statement.executeQuery() as well as all PreparedStatement and CallableStatement parameters with the exclusion of parameters set using setBytes(), setBinaryStream(), setAsciiStream(), setUnicodeStream() and setBlob() .

Prior to MySQL Server 4.1, Connector/J supported a single character encoding per connection, which could either be automatically detected from the server configuration, or could be configured by the user through the useUnicode and characterEncoding properties.

Starting with MySQL Server 4.1, Connector/J supports a single character encoding between client and server, and any number of character encodings for data returned by the server to the client in ResultSets.

The character encoding between client and server is automatically detected upon connection. The encoding used by the driver is specified on the server via the character_set system variable for server versions older than 4.1.0 and character_set_server for server versions 4.1.0 and newer. For more information, see Section 10.3.1, “Server Character Set and Collation”.

To override the automatically-detected encoding on the client side, use the characterEncoding property in the URL used to connect to the server.

When specifying character encodings on the client side, Java-style names should be used. The following table lists Java-style names for MySQL character sets:

MySQL to Java Encoding Name Translations. 

MySQL Character Set NameJava-Style Character Encoding Name
asciiUS-ASCII
big5Big5
gbkGBK
sjisSJIS (or Cp932 or MS932 for MySQL Server < 4.1.11)
cp932Cp932 or MS932 (MySQL Server > 4.1.11)
gb2312EUC_CN
ujisEUC_JP
euckrEUC_KR
latin1ISO8859_1
latin2ISO8859_2
greekISO8859_7
hebrewISO8859_8
cp866Cp866
tis620TIS620
cp1250Cp1250
cp1251Cp1251
cp1257Cp1257
macromanMacRoman
macceMacCentralEurope
utf8UTF-8
ucs2UnicodeBig

Warning

Do not issue the query 'set names' with Connector/J, as the driver will not detect that the character set has changed, and will continue to use the character set detected during the initial connection setup.

To allow multiple character sets to be sent from the client, the UTF-8 encoding should be used, either by configuring utf8 as the default server character set, or by configuring the JDBC driver to use UTF-8 through the characterEncoding property.

23.4.4.5. Connecting Securely Using SSL

SSL in MySQL Connector/J encrypts all data (other than the initial handshake) between the JDBC driver and the server. The performance penalty for enabling SSL is an increase in query processing time between 35% and 50%, depending on the size of the query, and the amount of data it returns.

For SSL Support to work, you must have the following:

You will first need to import the MySQL server CA Certificate into a Java truststore. A sample MySQL server CA Certificate is located in the SSL subdirectory of the MySQL source distribution. This is what SSL will use to determine if you are communicating with a secure MySQL server.

To use Java's keytool to create a truststore in the current directory , and import the server's CA certificate (cacert.pem), you can do the following (assuming that keytool is in your path. The keytool should be located in the bin subdirectory of your JDK or JRE):

shell> keytool -import -alias mysqlServerCACert \
                                  -file cacert.pem -keystore truststore

Keytool will respond with the following information:

Enter keystore password:  *********
Owner: EMAILADDRESS=walrus@example.com, CN=Walrus, 
       O=MySQL AB, L=Orenburg, ST=Some-State, C=RU
Issuer: EMAILADDRESS=walrus@example.com, CN=Walrus, 
       O=MySQL AB, L=Orenburg, ST=Some-State, C=RU
Serial number: 0
Valid from: 
   Fri Aug 02 16:55:53 CDT 2002 until: Sat Aug 02 16:55:53 CDT 2003
Certificate fingerprints:
    MD5:  61:91:A0:F2:03:07:61:7A:81:38:66:DA:19:C4:8D:AB
    SHA1: 25:77:41:05:D5:AD:99:8C:14:8C:CA:68:9C:2F:B8:89:C3:34:4D:6C
Trust this certificate? [no]:  yes
Certificate was added to keystore

You will then need to generate a client certificate, so that the MySQL server knows that it is talking to a secure client:

 shell> keytool -genkey -keyalg rsa \
     -alias mysqlClientCertificate -keystore keystore

Keytool will prompt you for the following information, and create a keystore named keystore in the current directory.

You should respond with information that is appropriate for your situation:

Enter keystore password:  *********
What is your first and last name?
  [Unknown]:  Matthews
What is the name of your organizational unit?
  [Unknown]:  Software Development
What is the name of your organization?
  [Unknown]:  MySQL AB
What is the name of your City or Locality?
  [Unknown]:  Flossmoor
What is the name of your State or Province?
  [Unknown]:  IL
What is the two-letter country code for this unit?
  [Unknown]:  US
Is <CN=Matthews, OU=Software Development, O=MySQL AB,
 L=Flossmoor, ST=IL, C=US> correct?
  [no]:  y

Enter key password for <mysqlClientCertificate>
        (RETURN if same as keystore password):

Finally, to get JSSE to use the keystore and truststore that you have generated, you need to set the following system properties when you start your JVM, replacing path_to_keystore_file with the full path to the keystore file you created, path_to_truststore_file with the path to the truststore file you created, and using the appropriate password values for each property. You can do this either on the command line:

-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore=path_to_keystore_file
-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=password
-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=path_to_truststore_file
-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword=password

Or you can set the values directly within the application:

 System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.keyStore","path_to_keystore_file");
System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword","password");
System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStore","path_to_truststore_file");
System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword","password");

You will also need to set useSSL to true in your connection parameters for MySQL Connector/J, either by adding useSSL=true to your URL, or by setting the property useSSL to true in the java.util.Properties instance you pass to DriverManager.getConnection().

You can test that SSL is working by turning on JSSE debugging (as detailed below), and look for the following key events:

...
*** ClientHello, v3.1
RandomCookie:  GMT: 1018531834 bytes = { 199, 148, 180, 215, 74, 12, »
  54, 244, 0, 168, 55, 103, 215, 64, 16, 138, 225, 190, 132, 153, 2, »
  217, 219, 239, 202, 19, 121, 78 }
Session ID:  {}
Cipher Suites:  { 0, 5, 0, 4, 0, 9, 0, 10, 0, 18, 0, 19, 0, 3, 0, 17 }
Compression Methods:  { 0 }
***
[write] MD5 and SHA1 hashes:  len = 59
0000: 01 00 00 37 03 01 3D B6 90 FA C7 94 B4 D7 4A 0C  ...7..=.......J.
0010: 36 F4 00 A8 37 67 D7 40 10 8A E1 BE 84 99 02 D9  6...7g.@........
0020: DB EF CA 13 79 4E 00 00 10 00 05 00 04 00 09 00  ....yN..........
0030: 0A 00 12 00 13 00 03 00 11 01 00                 ...........
main, WRITE:  SSL v3.1 Handshake, length = 59
main, READ:  SSL v3.1 Handshake, length = 74
*** ServerHello, v3.1
RandomCookie:  GMT: 1018577560 bytes = { 116, 50, 4, 103, 25, 100, 58, »
   202, 79, 185, 178, 100, 215, 66, 254, 21, 83, 187, 190, 42, 170, 3, »
   132, 110, 82, 148, 160, 92 }
Session ID:  {163, 227, 84, 53, 81, 127, 252, 254, 178, 179, 68, 63, »
   182, 158, 30, 11, 150, 79, 170, 76, 255, 92, 15, 226, 24, 17, 177, »
   219, 158, 177, 187, 143}
Cipher Suite:  { 0, 5 }
Compression Method: 0
***
%% Created:  [Session-1, SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA]
** SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA
[read] MD5 and SHA1 hashes:  len = 74
0000: 02 00 00 46 03 01 3D B6 43 98 74 32 04 67 19 64  ...F..=.C.t2.g.d
0010: 3A CA 4F B9 B2 64 D7 42 FE 15 53 BB BE 2A AA 03  :.O..d.B..S..*..
0020: 84 6E 52 94 A0 5C 20 A3 E3 54 35 51 7F FC FE B2  .nR..\ ..T5Q....
0030: B3 44 3F B6 9E 1E 0B 96 4F AA 4C FF 5C 0F E2 18  .D?.....O.L.\...
0040: 11 B1 DB 9E B1 BB 8F 00 05 00                    ..........
main, READ:  SSL v3.1 Handshake, length = 1712
...

JSSE provides debugging (to STDOUT) when you set the following system property: -Djavax.net.debug=all This will tell you what keystores and truststores are being used, as well as what is going on during the SSL handshake and certificate exchange. It will be helpful when trying to determine what is not working when trying to get an SSL connection to happen.

23.4.4.6. Using Master/Slave Replication with ReplicationConnection

Starting with Connector/J 3.1.7, we've made available a variant of the driver that will automatically send queries to a read/write master, or a failover or round-robin loadbalanced set of slaves based on the state of Connection.getReadOnly() .

An application signals that it wants a transaction to be read-only by calling Connection.setReadOnly(true), this replication-aware connection will use one of the slave connections, which are load-balanced per-vm using a round-robin scheme (a given connection is sticky to a slave unless that slave is removed from service). If you have a write transaction, or if you have a read that is time-sensitive (remember, replication in MySQL is asynchronous), set the connection to be not read-only, by calling Connection.setReadOnly(false) and the driver will ensure that further calls are sent to the master MySQL server. The driver takes care of propagating the current state of autocommit, isolation level, and catalog between all of the connections that it uses to accomplish this load balancing functionality.

To enable this functionality, use the " com.mysql.jdbc.ReplicationDriver " class when configuring your application server's connection pool or when creating an instance of a JDBC driver for your standalone application. Because it accepts the same URL format as the standard MySQL JDBC driver, ReplicationDriver does not currently work with java.sql.DriverManager -based connection creation unless it is the only MySQL JDBC driver registered with the DriverManager .

Here is a short, simple example of how ReplicationDriver might be used in a standalone application.

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.util.Properties;

import com.mysql.jdbc.ReplicationDriver;

public class ReplicationDriverDemo {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    ReplicationDriver driver = new ReplicationDriver();

    Properties props = new Properties();

    // We want this for failover on the slaves
    props.put("autoReconnect", "true");

    // We want to load balance between the slaves
    props.put("roundRobinLoadBalance", "true");

    props.put("user", "foo");
    props.put("password", "bar");

    //
    // Looks like a normal MySQL JDBC url, with a
    // comma-separated list of hosts, the first 
    // being the 'master', the rest being any number
    // of slaves that the driver will load balance against
    //

    Connection conn =
        driver.connect("jdbc:mysql://master,slave1,slave2,slave3/test",
            props);

    //
    // Perform read/write work on the master
    // by setting the read-only flag to "false"
    //

    conn.setReadOnly(false);
    conn.setAutoCommit(false);
    conn.createStatement().executeUpdate("UPDATE some_table ....");
    conn.commit();

    //
    // Now, do a query from a slave, the driver automatically picks one
    // from the list
    //

    conn.setReadOnly(true);

    ResultSet rs = 
      conn.createStatement().executeQuery("SELECT a,b FROM alt_table");

     .......
  }
}

23.4.4.7. Mapping MySQL Error Numbers to SQLStates

The table below provides a mapping of the MySQL Error Numbers to SQL States

Table 23.1. Mapping of MySQL Error Numbers to SQLStates
MySQL Error NumberMySQL Error NameLegacy (X/Open) SQLStateSQL Standard SQLState
1022ER_DUP_KEYS100023000
1037ER_OUTOFMEMORYS1001HY001
1038ER_OUT_OF_SORTMEMORYS1001HY001
1040ER_CON_COUNT_ERROR0800408004
1042ER_BAD_HOST_ERROR0800408S01
1043ER_HANDSHAKE_ERROR0800408S01
1044ER_DBACCESS_DENIED_ERRORS100042000
1045ER_ACCESS_DENIED_ERROR2800028000
1047ER_UNKNOWN_COM_ERROR08S01HY000
1050ER_TABLE_EXISTS_ERRORS100042S01
1051ER_BAD_TABLE_ERROR42S0242S02
1052ER_NON_UNIQ_ERRORS100023000
1053ER_SERVER_SHUTDOWNS100008S01
1054ER_BAD_FIELD_ERRORS002242S22
1055ER_WRONG_FIELD_WITH_GROUPS100942000
1056ER_WRONG_GROUP_FIELDS100942000
1057ER_WRONG_SUM_SELECTS100942000
1058ER_WRONG_VALUE_COUNT21S0121S01
1059ER_TOO_LONG_IDENTS100942000
1060ER_DUP_FIELDNAMES100942S21
1061ER_DUP_KEYNAMES100942000
1062ER_DUP_ENTRYS100923000
1063ER_WRONG_FIELD_SPECS100942000
1064ER_PARSE_ERROR4200042000
1065ER_EMPTY_QUERY4200042000
1066ER_NONUNIQ_TABLES100942000
1067ER_INVALID_DEFAULTS100942000
1068ER_MULTIPLE_PRI_KEYS100942000
1069ER_TOO_MANY_KEYSS100942000
1070ER_TOO_MANY_KEY_PARTSS100942000
1071ER_TOO_LONG_KEYS100942000
1072ER_KEY_COLUMN_DOES_NOT_EXITSS100942000
1073ER_BLOB_USED_AS_KEYS100942000
1074ER_TOO_BIG_FIELDLENGTHS100942000
1075ER_WRONG_AUTO_KEYS100942000
1080ER_FORCING_CLOSES100008S01
1081ER_IPSOCK_ERROR08S0108S01
1082ER_NO_SUCH_INDEXS100942S12
1083ER_WRONG_FIELD_TERMINATORSS100942000
1084ER_BLOBS_AND_NO_TERMINATEDS100942000
1090ER_CANT_REMOVE_ALL_FIELDSS100042000
1091ER_CANT_DROP_FIELD_OR_KEYS100042000
1101ER_BLOB_CANT_HAVE_DEFAULTS100042000
1102ER_WRONG_DB_NAMES100042000
1103ER_WRONG_TABLE_NAMES100042000
1104ER_TOO_BIG_SELECTS100042000
1106ER_UNKNOWN_PROCEDURES100042000
1107ER_WRONG_PARAMCOUNT_TO_PROCEDURES100042000
1109ER_UNKNOWN_TABLES100042S02
1110ER_FIELD_SPECIFIED_TWICES100042000
1112ER_UNSUPPORTED_EXTENSIONS100042000
1113ER_TABLE_MUST_HAVE_COLUMNSS100042000
1115ER_UNKNOWN_CHARACTER_SETS100042000
1118ER_TOO_BIG_ROWSIZES100042000
1120ER_WRONG_OUTER_JOINS100042000
1121ER_NULL_COLUMN_IN_INDEXS100042000
1129ER_HOST_IS_BLOCKED08004HY000
1130ER_HOST_NOT_PRIVILEGED08004HY000
1131ER_PASSWORD_ANONYMOUS_USERS100042000
1132ER_PASSWORD_NOT_ALLOWEDS100042000
1133ER_PASSWORD_NO_MATCHS100042000
1136ER_WRONG_VALUE_COUNT_ON_ROWS100021S01
1138ER_INVALID_USE_OF_NULLS100042000
1139ER_REGEXP_ERRORS100042000
1140ER_MIX_OF_GROUP_FUNC_AND_FIELDSS100042000
1141ER_NONEXISTING_GRANTS100042000
1142ER_TABLEACCESS_DENIED_ERRORS100042000
1143ER_COLUMNACCESS_DENIED_ERRORS100042000
1144ER_ILLEGAL_GRANT_FOR_TABLES100042000
1145ER_GRANT_WRONG_HOST_OR_USERS100042000
1146ER_NO_SUCH_TABLES100042S02
1147ER_NONEXISTING_TABLE_GRANTS100042000
1148ER_NOT_ALLOWED_COMMANDS100042000
1149ER_SYNTAX_ERRORS100042000
1152ER_ABORTING_CONNECTIONS100008S01
1153ER_NET_PACKET_TOO_LARGES100008S01
1154ER_NET_READ_ERROR_FROM_PIPES100008S01
1155ER_NET_FCNTL_ERRORS100008S01
1156ER_NET_PACKETS_OUT_OF_ORDERS100008S01
1157ER_NET_UNCOMPRESS_ERRORS100008S01
1158ER_NET_READ_ERRORS100008S01
1159ER_NET_READ_INTERRUPTEDS100008S01
1160ER_NET_ERROR_ON_WRITES100008S01
1161ER_NET_WRITE_INTERRUPTEDS100008S01
1162ER_TOO_LONG_STRINGS100042000
1163ER_TABLE_CANT_HANDLE_BLOBS100042000
1164ER_TABLE_CANT_HANDLE_AUTO_INCREMENTS100042000
1166ER_WRONG_COLUMN_NAMES100042000
1167ER_WRONG_KEY_COLUMNS100042000
1169ER_DUP_UNIQUES100023000
1170ER_BLOB_KEY_WITHOUT_LENGTHS100042000
1171ER_PRIMARY_CANT_HAVE_NULLS100042000
1172ER_TOO_MANY_ROWSS100042000
1173ER_REQUIRES_PRIMARY_KEYS100042000
1177ER_CHECK_NO_SUCH_TABLES100042000
1178ER_CHECK_NOT_IMPLEMENTEDS100042000
1179ER_CANT_DO_THIS_DURING_AN_TRANSACTIONS100025000
1184ER_NEW_ABORTING_CONNECTIONS100008S01
1189ER_MASTER_NET_READS100008S01
1190ER_MASTER_NET_WRITES100008S01
1203ER_TOO_MANY_USER_CONNECTIONSS100042000
1205ER_LOCK_WAIT_TIMEOUT4100041000
1207ER_READ_ONLY_TRANSACTIONS100025000
1211ER_NO_PERMISSION_TO_CREATE_USERS100042000
1213ER_LOCK_DEADLOCK4100040001
1216ER_NO_REFERENCED_ROWS100023000
1217ER_ROW_IS_REFERENCEDS100023000
1218ER_CONNECT_TO_MASTERS100008S01
1222ER_WRONG_NUMBER_OF_COLUMNS_IN_SELECTS100021000
1226ER_USER_LIMIT_REACHEDS100042000
1230ER_NO_DEFAULTS100042000
1231ER_WRONG_VALUE_FOR_VARS100042000
1232ER_WRONG_TYPE_FOR_VARS100042000
1234ER_CANT_USE_OPTION_HERES100042000
1235ER_NOT_SUPPORTED_YETS100042000
1239ER_WRONG_FK_DEFS100042000
1241ER_OPERAND_COLUMNSS100021000
1242ER_SUBQUERY_NO_1_ROWS100021000
1247ER_ILLEGAL_REFERENCES100042S22
1248ER_DERIVED_MUST_HAVE_ALIASS100042000
1249ER_SELECT_REDUCEDS100001000
1250ER_TABLENAME_NOT_ALLOWED_HERES100042000
1251ER_NOT_SUPPORTED_AUTH_MODES100008004
1252ER_SPATIAL_CANT_HAVE_NULLS100042000
1253ER_COLLATION_CHARSET_MISMATCHS100042000
1261ER_WARN_TOO_FEW_RECORDSS100001000
1262ER_WARN_TOO_MANY_RECORDSS100001000
1263ER_WARN_NULL_TO_NOTNULLS100001000
1264ER_WARN_DATA_OUT_OF_RANGES100001000
1265ER_WARN_DATA_TRUNCATEDS100001000
1280ER_WRONG_NAME_FOR_INDEXS100042000
1281ER_WRONG_NAME_FOR_CATALOGS100042000
1286ER_UNKNOWN_STORAGE_ENGINES100042000

23.4.5. Connector/J Notes and Tips

23.4.5.1. Basic JDBC Concepts

This section provides some general JDBC background.

23.4.5.1.1. Connecting to MySQL Using the DriverManager Interface

When you are using JDBC outside of an application server, the DriverManager class manages the establishment of Connections.

The DriverManager needs to be told which JDBC drivers it should try to make Connections with. The easiest way to do this is to use Class.forName() on the class that implements the java.sql.Driver interface. With MySQL Connector/J, the name of this class is com.mysql.jdbc.Driver. With this method, you could use an external configuration file to supply the driver class name and driver parameters to use when connecting to a database.

The following section of Java code shows how you might register MySQL Connector/J from the main() method of your application:

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.SQLException;

// Notice, do not import com.mysql.jdbc.*
// or you will have problems!

public class LoadDriver {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            // The newInstance() call is a work around for some
            // broken Java implementations

            Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver").newInstance();
        } catch (Exception ex) {
            // handle the error
        }
}

After the driver has been registered with the DriverManager, you can obtain a Connection instance that is connected to a particular database by calling DriverManager.getConnection():

Example 23.1. Obtaining a connection from the DriverManager

This example shows how you can obtain a Connection instance from the DriverManager. There are a few different signatures for the getConnection() method. You should see the API documentation that comes with your JDK for more specific information on how to use them.

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.SQLException;

...
try {
    Connection conn = 
       DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/test?" + 
                                   "user=monty&password=greatsqldb");

    // Do something with the Connection

   ...
} catch (SQLException ex) {
    // handle any errors
    System.out.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage());
    System.out.println("SQLState: " + ex.getSQLState());
    System.out.println("VendorError: " + ex.getErrorCode());
}

Once a Connection is established, it can be used to create Statement and PreparedStatement objects, as well as retrieve metadata about the database. This is explained in the following sections.

23.4.5.1.2. Using Statements to Execute SQL

Statement objects allow you to execute basic SQL queries and retrieve the results through the ResultSet class which is described later.

To create a Statement instance, you call the createStatement() method on the Connection object you have retrieved via one of the DriverManager.getConnection() or DataSource.getConnection() methods described earlier.

Once you have a Statement instance, you can execute a SELECT query by calling the executeQuery(String) method with the SQL you want to use.

To update data in the database, use the executeUpdate(String SQL) method. This method returns the number of rows affected by the update statement.

If you don't know ahead of time whether the SQL statement will be a SELECT or an UPDATE/INSERT, then you can use the execute(String SQL) method. This method will return true if the SQL query was a SELECT, or false if it was an UPDATE, INSERT, or DELETE statement. If the statement was a SELECT query, you can retrieve the results by calling the getResultSet() method. If the statement was an UPDATE, INSERT, or DELETE statement, you can retrieve the affected rows count by calling getUpdateCount() on the Statement instance.

Example 23.2. Using java.sql.Statement to execute a SELECT query

// assume that conn is an already created JDBC connection
Statement stmt = null;
ResultSet rs = null;

try {
    stmt = conn.createStatement();
    rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT foo FROM bar");

    // or alternatively, if you don't know ahead of time that
    // the query will be a SELECT...

    if (stmt.execute("SELECT foo FROM bar")) {
        rs = stmt.getResultSet();
    }

    // Now do something with the ResultSet ....
} finally {
    // it is a good idea to release
    // resources in a finally{} block
    // in reverse-order of their creation
    // if they are no-longer needed

    if (rs != null) {
        try {
            rs.close();
        } catch (SQLException sqlEx) { // ignore }

        rs = null;
    }

    if (stmt != null) {
        try {
            stmt.close();
        } catch (SQLException sqlEx) { // ignore }

        stmt = null;
    }
}
23.4.5.1.3. Using CallableStatements to Execute Stored Procedures

Starting with MySQL server version 5.0 when used with Connector/J 3.1.1 or newer, the java.sql.CallableStatement interface is fully implemented with the exception of the getParameterMetaData() method.

See Chapter 17, Stored Procedures and Functions, for more information on MySQL stored procedures.

Connector/J exposes stored procedure functionality through JDBC's CallableStatement interface.

Note

Current versions of MySQL server do not return enough information for the JDBC driver to provide result set metadata for callable statements. This means that when using CallableStatement, ResultSetMetaData may return NULL.

The following example shows a stored procedure that returns the value of inOutParam incremented by 1, and the string passed in via inputParam as a ResultSet:

Example 23.3. Stored Procedures

CREATE PROCEDURE demoSp(IN inputParam VARCHAR(255), \ 
                                        INOUT inOutParam INT)
BEGIN
    DECLARE z INT;
    SET z = inOutParam + 1;
    SET inOutParam = z;

    SELECT inputParam;

    SELECT CONCAT('zyxw', inputParam);
END

To use the demoSp procedure with Connector/J, follow these steps:

  1. Prepare the callable statement by using Connection.prepareCall() .

    Notice that you have to use JDBC escape syntax, and that the parentheses surrounding the parameter placeholders are not optional:

    Example 23.4. Using Connection.prepareCall()

    import java.sql.CallableStatement;
    
    ...
    
        //
        // Prepare a call to the stored procedure 'demoSp'
        // with two parameters
        //
        // Notice the use of JDBC-escape syntax ({call ...})
        //
    
        CallableStatement cStmt = conn.prepareCall("{call demoSp(?, ?)}");
    
    
    
        cStmt.setString(1, "abcdefg");

    Note

    Connection.prepareCall() is an expensive method, due to the metadata retrieval that the driver performs to support output parameters. For performance reasons, you should try to minimize unnecessary calls to Connection.prepareCall() by reusing CallableStatement instances in your code.

  2. Register the output parameters (if any exist)

    To retrieve the values of output parameters (parameters specified as OUT or INOUT when you created the stored procedure), JDBC requires that they be specified before statement execution using the various registerOutputParameter() methods in the CallableStatement interface:

    Example 23.5. Registering output parameters

    import java.sql.Types;
    ...
    //
    // Connector/J supports both named and indexed
    // output parameters. You can register output
    // parameters using either method, as well
    // as retrieve output parameters using either
    // method, regardless of what method was
    // used to register them.
    //
    // The following examples show how to use
    // the various methods of registering
    // output parameters (you should of course
    // use only one registration per parameter).
    //
    
    //
    // Registers the second parameter as output, and
    // uses the type 'INTEGER' for values returned from
    // getObject()
    //
    
    cStmt.registerOutParameter(2, Types.INTEGER);
    
    //
    // Registers the named parameter 'inOutParam', and
    // uses the type 'INTEGER' for values returned from
    // getObject()
    //
    
    cStmt.registerOutParameter("inOutParam", Types.INTEGER);
    ...

  3. Set the input parameters (if any exist)

    Input and in/out parameters are set as for PreparedStatement objects. However, CallableStatement also supports setting parameters by name:

    Example 23.6. Setting CallableStatement input parameters

    ...
    
        //
        // Set a parameter by index
        //
    
        cStmt.setString(1, "abcdefg");
    
        //
        // Alternatively, set a parameter using
        // the parameter name
        //
    
        cStmt.setString("inputParameter", "abcdefg");
    
        //
        // Set the 'in/out' parameter using an index
        //
    
        cStmt.setInt(2, 1);
    
        //
        // Alternatively, set the 'in/out' parameter
        // by name
        //
    
        cStmt.setInt("inOutParam", 1);
    
    ...

  4. Execute the CallableStatement, and retrieve any result sets or output parameters.

    Although CallableStatement supports calling any of the Statement execute methods (executeUpdate(), executeQuery() or execute()), the most flexible method to call is execute(), as you do not need to know ahead of time if the stored procedure returns result sets:

    Example 23.7. Retrieving results and output parameter values

    ...
    
        boolean hadResults = cStmt.execute();
    
        //
        // Process all returned result sets
        //
    
        while (hadResults) {
            ResultSet rs = cStmt.getResultSet();
    
            // process result set
            ...
    
            hadResults = rs.getMoreResults();
        }
    
        //
        // Retrieve output parameters
        //
        // Connector/J supports both index-based and
        // name-based retrieval
        //
    
        int outputValue = cStmt.getInt(2); // index-based
    
        outputValue = cStmt.getInt("inOutParam"); // name-based
    
    ...

23.4.5.1.4. Retrieving AUTO_INCREMENT Column Values

Before version 3.0 of the JDBC API, there was no standard way of retrieving key values from databases that supported auto increment or identity columns. With older JDBC drivers for MySQL, you could always use a MySQL-specific method on the Statement interface, or issue the query SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() after issuing an INSERT to a table that had an AUTO_INCREMENT key. Using the MySQL-specific method call isn't portable, and issuing a SELECT to get the AUTO_INCREMENT key's value requires another round-trip to the database, which isn't as efficient as possible. The following code snippets demonstrate the three different ways to retrieve AUTO_INCREMENT values. First, we demonstrate the use of the new JDBC-3.0 method getGeneratedKeys() which is now the preferred method to use if you need to retrieve AUTO_INCREMENT keys and have access to JDBC-3.0. The second example shows how you can retrieve the same value using a standard SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() query. The final example shows how updatable result sets can retrieve the AUTO_INCREMENT value when using the insertRow() method.

Example 23.8. Retrieving AUTO_INCREMENT column values using Statement.getGeneratedKeys()

   Statement stmt = null;
   ResultSet rs = null;

   try {

    //
    // Create a Statement instance that we can use for
    // 'normal' result sets assuming you have a
    // Connection 'conn' to a MySQL database already
    // available

    stmt = conn.createStatement(java.sql.ResultSet.TYPE_FORWARD_ONLY,
                                java.sql.ResultSet.CONCUR_UPDATABLE);

    //
    // Issue the DDL queries for the table for this example
    //

    stmt.executeUpdate("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS autoIncTutorial");
    stmt.executeUpdate(
            "CREATE TABLE autoIncTutorial ("
            + "priKey INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, "
            + "dataField VARCHAR(64), PRIMARY KEY (priKey))");

    //
    // Insert one row that will generate an AUTO INCREMENT
    // key in the 'priKey' field
    //

    stmt.executeUpdate(
            "INSERT INTO autoIncTutorial (dataField) "
            + "values ('Can I Get the Auto Increment Field?')",
            Statement.RETURN_GENERATED_KEYS);

    //
    // Example of using Statement.getGeneratedKeys()
    // to retrieve the value of an auto-increment
    // value
    //

    int autoIncKeyFromApi = -1;

    rs = stmt.getGeneratedKeys();

    if (rs.next()) {
        autoIncKeyFromApi = rs.getInt(1);
    } else {

        // throw an exception from here
    }

    rs.close();

    rs = null;

    System.out.println("Key returned from getGeneratedKeys():"
        + autoIncKeyFromApi);
} finally {

    if (rs != null) {
        try {
            rs.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
            // ignore
        }
    }

    if (stmt != null) {
        try {
            stmt.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
            // ignore
        }
    }
}

Example 23.9. Retrieving AUTO_INCREMENT column values using SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()

   Statement stmt = null;
   ResultSet rs = null;

   try {

    //
    // Create a Statement instance that we can use for
    // 'normal' result sets.

    stmt = conn.createStatement();

    //
    // Issue the DDL queries for the table for this example
    //

    stmt.executeUpdate("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS autoIncTutorial");
    stmt.executeUpdate(
            "CREATE TABLE autoIncTutorial ("
            + "priKey INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, "
            + "dataField VARCHAR(64), PRIMARY KEY (priKey))");

    //
    // Insert one row that will generate an AUTO INCREMENT
    // key in the 'priKey' field
    //

    stmt.executeUpdate(
            "INSERT INTO autoIncTutorial (dataField) "
            + "values ('Can I Get the Auto Increment Field?')");

    //
    // Use the MySQL LAST_INSERT_ID()
    // function to do the same thing as getGeneratedKeys()
    //

    int autoIncKeyFromFunc = -1;
    rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()");

    if (rs.next()) {
        autoIncKeyFromFunc = rs.getInt(1);
    } else {
        // throw an exception from here
    }

    rs.close();

    System.out.println("Key returned from " + 
                       "'SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()': " +
                       autoIncKeyFromFunc);

} finally {

    if (rs != null) {
        try {
            rs.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
            // ignore
        }
    }

    if (stmt != null) {
        try {
            stmt.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
            // ignore
        }
    }
}

Example 23.10. Retrieving AUTO_INCREMENT column values in Updatable ResultSets

   Statement stmt = null;
   ResultSet rs = null;

   try {

    //
    // Create a Statement instance that we can use for
    // 'normal' result sets as well as an 'updatable'
    // one, assuming you have a Connection 'conn' to
    // a MySQL database already available
    //

    stmt = conn.createStatement(java.sql.ResultSet.TYPE_FORWARD_ONLY,
                                java.sql.ResultSet.CONCUR_UPDATABLE);

    //
    // Issue the DDL queries for the table for this example
    //

    stmt.executeUpdate("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS autoIncTutorial");
    stmt.executeUpdate(
            "CREATE TABLE autoIncTutorial ("
            + "priKey INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, "
            + "dataField VARCHAR(64), PRIMARY KEY (priKey))");

    //
    // Example of retrieving an AUTO INCREMENT key
    // from an updatable result set
    //

    rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT priKey, dataField "
       + "FROM autoIncTutorial");

    rs.moveToInsertRow();

    rs.updateString("dataField", "AUTO INCREMENT here?");
    rs.insertRow();

    //
    // the driver adds rows at the end
    //

    rs.last();

    //
    // We should now be on the row we just inserted
    //

    int autoIncKeyFromRS = rs.getInt("priKey");

    rs.close();

    rs = null;

    System.out.println("Key returned for inserted row: "
        + autoIncKeyFromRS);

} finally {

    if (rs != null) {
        try {
            rs.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
            // ignore
        }
    }

    if (stmt != null) {
        try {
            stmt.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
            // ignore
        }
    }
}

When you run the preceding example code, you should get the following output: Key returned from getGeneratedKeys(): 1 Key returned from SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID(): 1 Key returned for inserted row: 2 You should be aware, that at times, it can be tricky to use the SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() query, as that function's value is scoped to a connection. So, if some other query happens on the same connection, the value will be overwritten. On the other hand, the getGeneratedKeys() method is scoped by the Statement instance, so it can be used even if other queries happen on the same connection, but not on the same Statement instance.

23.4.5.2. Using Connector/J with J2EE and Other Java Frameworks

This section describes how to use Connector/J in several contexts.

23.4.5.2.1. General J2EE Concepts

This section provides general background on J2EE concepts that pertain to use of Connector/J.

23.4.5.2.1.1. Understanding Connection Pooling

Connection pooling is a technique of creating and managing a pool of connections that are ready for use by any thread that needs them.

This technique of pooling connections is based on the fact that most applications only need a thread to have access to a JDBC connection when they are actively processing a transaction, which usually take only milliseconds to complete. When not processing a transaction, the connection would otherwise sit idle. Instead, connection pooling allows the idle connection to be used by some other thread to do useful work.

In practice, when a thread needs to do work against a MySQL or other database with JDBC, it requests a connection from the pool. When the thread is finished using the connection, it returns it to the pool, so that it may be used by any other threads that want to use it.

When the connection is loaned out from the pool, it is used exclusively by the thread that requested it. From a programming point of view, it is the same as if your thread called DriverManager.getConnection() every time it needed a JDBC connection, however with connection pooling, your thread may end up using either a new, or already-existing connection.

Connection pooling can greatly increase the performance of your Java application, while reducing overall resource usage. The main benefits to connection pooling are:

  • Reduced connection creation time

    Although this is not usually an issue with the quick connection setup that MySQL offers compared to other databases, creating new JDBC connections still incurs networking and JDBC driver overhead that will be avoided if connections are recycled.

  • Simplified programming model

    When using connection pooling, each individual thread can act as though it has created its own JDBC connection, allowing you to use straight-forward JDBC programming techniques.

  • Controlled resource usage

    If you don't use connection pooling, and instead create a new connection every time a thread needs one, your application's resource usage can be quite wasteful and lead to unpredictable behavior under load.

Remember that each connection to MySQL has overhead (memory, CPU, context switches, and so forth) on both the client and server side. Every connection limits how many resources there are available to your application as well as the MySQL server. Many of these resources will be used whether or not the connection is actually doing any useful work!

Connection pools can be tuned to maximize performance, while keeping resource utilization below the point where your application will start to fail rather than just run slower.

Luckily, Sun has standardized the concept of connection pooling in JDBC through the JDBC-2.0 Optional interfaces, and all major application servers have implementations of these APIs that work fine with MySQL Connector/J.

Generally, you configure a connection pool in your application server configuration files, and access it via the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI). The following code shows how you might use a connection pool from an application deployed in a J2EE application server:

Example 23.11. Using a connection pool with a J2EE application server

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.sql.Statement;

import javax.naming.InitialContext;
import javax.sql.DataSource;


public class MyServletJspOrEjb {

    public void doSomething() throws Exception {
        /*
         * Create a JNDI Initial context to be able to
         *  lookup  the DataSource
         *
         * In production-level code, this should be cached as
         * an instance or static variable, as it can
         * be quite expensive to create a JNDI context.
         *
         * Note: This code only works when you are using servlets
         * or EJBs in a J2EE application server. If you are
         * using connection pooling in standalone Java code, you
         * will have to create/configure datasources using whatever
         * mechanisms your particular connection pooling library
         * provides.
         */

        InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();

         /*
          * Lookup the DataSource, which will be backed by a pool
          * that the application server provides. DataSource instances
          * are also a good candidate for caching as an instance
          * variable, as JNDI lookups can be expensive as well.
          */

        DataSource ds = 
          (DataSource)ctx.lookup("java:comp/env/jdbc/MySQLDB");

        /*
         * The following code is what would actually be in your
         * Servlet, JSP or EJB 'service' method...where you need
         * to work with a JDBC connection.
         */

        Connection conn = null;
        Statement stmt = null;

        try {
            conn = ds.getConnection();

            /*
             * Now, use normal JDBC programming to work with
             * MySQL, making sure to close each resource when you're
             * finished with it, which allows the connection pool
             * resources to be recovered as quickly as possible
             */

            stmt = conn.createStatement();
            stmt.execute("SOME SQL QUERY");

            stmt.close();
            stmt = null;

            conn.close();
            conn = null;
        } finally {
            /*
             * close any jdbc instances here that weren't
             * explicitly closed during normal code path, so
             * that we don't 'leak' resources...
             */

            if (stmt != null) {
                try {
                    stmt.close();
                } catch (sqlexception sqlex) {
                    // ignore -- as we can't do anything about it here
                }

                stmt = null;
            }

            if (conn != null) {
                try {
                    conn.close();
                } catch (sqlexception sqlex) {
                    // ignore -- as we can't do anything about it here
                }

                conn = null;
            }
        }
    }
}

As shown in the example above, after obtaining the JNDI InitialContext, and looking up the DataSource, the rest of the code should look familiar to anyone who has done JDBC programming in the past.

The most important thing to remember when using connection pooling is to make sure that no matter what happens in your code (exceptions, flow-of-control, and so forth), connections, and anything created by them (such as statements or result sets) are closed, so that they may be re-used, otherwise they will be stranded, which in the best case means that the MySQL server resources they represent (such as buffers, locks, or sockets) may be tied up for some time, or worst case, may be tied up forever.

What's the Best Size for my Connection Pool?

As with all other configuration rules-of-thumb, the answer is: it depends. Although the optimal size depends on anticipated load and average database transaction time, the optimum connection pool size is smaller than you might expect. If you take Sun's Java Petstore blueprint application for example, a connection pool of 15-20 connections can serve a relatively moderate load (600 concurrent users) using MySQL and Tomcat with response times that are acceptable.

To correctly size a connection pool for your application, you should create load test scripts with tools such as Apache JMeter or The Grinder, and load test your application.

An easy way to determine a starting point is to configure your connection pool's maximum number of connections to be unbounded, run a load test, and measure the largest amount of concurrently used connections. You can then work backward from there to determine what values of minimum and maximum pooled connections give the best performance for your particular application.

23.4.5.2.2. Using Connector/J with Tomcat

The following instructions are based on the instructions for Tomcat-5.x, available at http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.0-doc/jndi-datasource-examples-howto.html which is current at the time this document was written.

First, install the .jar file that comes with Connector/J in $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib so that it is available to all applications installed in the container.

Next, Configure the JNDI DataSource by adding a declaration resource to $CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml in the context that defines your web application:

<Context ....>

  ...

  <Resource name="jdbc/MySQLDB"
               auth="Container"
               type="javax.sql.DataSource"/>

  <!-- The name you used above, must match _exactly_ here!

       The connection pool will be bound into JNDI with the name
       "java:/comp/env/jdbc/MySQLDB"
  -->

  <ResourceParams name="jdbc/MySQLDB">
    <parameter>
      <name>factory</name>
      <value>org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSourceFactory</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- Don't set this any higher than max_connections on your
         MySQL server, usually this should be a 10 or a few 10's
         of connections, not hundreds or thousands -->

    <parameter>
      <name>maxActive</name>
      <value>10</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- You don't want to many idle connections hanging around
         if you can avoid it, only enough to soak up a spike in
         the load -->

    <parameter>
      <name>maxIdle</name>
      <value>5</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- Don't use autoReconnect=true, it's going away eventually
         and it's a crutch for older connection pools that couldn't
         test connections. You need to decide whether your application
         is supposed to deal with SQLExceptions (hint, it should), and
         how much of a performance penalty you're willing to pay
         to ensure 'freshness' of the connection -->

    <parameter>
      <name>validationQuery</name>
      <value>SELECT 1</value>
    </parameter>

   <!-- The most conservative approach is to test connections
        before they're given to your application. For most applications
        this is okay, the query used above is very small and takes
        no real server resources to process, other than the time used
        to traverse the network.

        If you have a high-load application you'll need to rely on
        something else. -->

    <parameter>
      <name>testOnBorrow</name>
      <value>true</value>
    </parameter>

   <!-- Otherwise, or in addition to testOnBorrow, you can test
        while connections are sitting idle -->

    <parameter>
      <name>testWhileIdle</name>
      <value>true</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- You have to set this value, otherwise even though
         you've asked connections to be tested while idle,
         the idle evicter thread will never run -->

    <parameter>
      <name>timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis</name>
      <value>10000</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- Don't allow connections to hang out idle too long,
         never longer than what wait_timeout is set to on the
         server...A few minutes or even fraction of a minute
         is sometimes okay here, it depends on your application
         and how much spikey load it will see -->

    <parameter>
      <name>minEvictableIdleTimeMillis</name>
      <value>60000</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- Username and password used when connecting to MySQL -->

    <parameter>
     <name>username</name>
     <value>someuser</value>
    </parameter>

    <parameter>
     <name>password</name>
     <value>somepass</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- Class name for the Connector/J driver -->

    <parameter>
       <name>driverClassName</name>
       <value>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</value>
    </parameter>

    <!-- The JDBC connection url for connecting to MySQL, notice
         that if you want to pass any other MySQL-specific parameters
         you should pass them here in the URL, setting them using the
         parameter tags above will have no effect, you will also
         need to use &amp; to separate parameter values as the
         ampersand is a reserved character in XML -->

    <parameter>
      <name>url</name>
      <value>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test</value>
    </parameter>

  </ResourceParams>
</Context>

In general, you should follow the installation instructions that come with your version of Tomcat, as the way you configure datasources in Tomcat changes from time-to-time, and unfortunately if you use the wrong syntax in your XML file, you will most likely end up with an exception similar to the following:

Error: java.sql.SQLException: Cannot load JDBC driver class 'null ' SQL
state: null
23.4.5.2.3. Using Connector/J with JBoss

These instructions cover JBoss-4.x. To make the JDBC driver classes available to the application server, copy the .jar file that comes with Connector/J to the lib directory for your server configuration (which is usually called default). Then, in the same configuration directory, in the subdirectory named deploy, create a datasource configuration file that ends with "-ds.xml", which tells JBoss to deploy this file as a JDBC Datasource. The file should have the following contents:

<datasources>
    <local-tx-datasource>
        <!-- This connection pool will be bound into JNDI with the name
             "java:/MySQLDB" -->

        <jndi-name>MySQLDB</jndi-name>
        <connection-url>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dbname</connection-url>
        <driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
        <user-name>user</user-name>
        <password>pass</password>

        <min-pool-size>5</min-pool-size>

        <!-- Don't set this any higher than max_connections on your
         MySQL server, usually this should be a 10 or a few 10's
         of connections, not hundreds or thousands -->

        <max-pool-size>20</max-pool-size>

        <!-- Don't allow connections to hang out idle too long,
         never longer than what wait_timeout is set to on the
         server...A few minutes is usually okay here,
         it depends on your application
         and how much spikey load it will see -->

        <idle-timeout-minutes>5</idle-timeout-minutes>

        <!-- If you're using Connector/J 3.1.8 or newer, you can use
             our implementation of these to increase the robustness
             of the connection pool. -->

        <exception-sorter-class-name> 
  com.mysql.jdbc.integration.jboss.ExtendedMysqlExceptionSorter
        </exception-sorter-class-name>
        <valid-connection-checker-class-name>
  com.mysql.jdbc.integration.jboss.MysqlValidConnectionChecker
        </valid-connection-checker-class-name>

    </local-tx-datasource>
</datasources>
23.4.5.2.4. Using Connector/J with Spring

The Spring Framework is a Java-based application framework designed for assisting in application design by providing a way to configure components. The technique used by Spring is a well known design pattern called Dependency Injection (see Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern). This article will focus on Java-oriented access to MySQL databases with Spring 2.0. For those wondering, there is a .NET port of Spring appropriately named Spring.NET.

Spring is not only a system for configuring components, but also includes support for aspect oriented programming (AOP). This is one of the main benefits and the foundation for Spring's resource and transaction management. Spring also provides utilities for integrating resource management with JDBC and Hibernate.

For the examples in this section the MySQL world sample database will be used. The first task is to setup a MySQL data source through Spring. Components within Spring use the "bean" terminology. For example, to configure a connection to a MySQL server supporting the world sample database you might use:

<util:map id="dbProps">
    <entry key="db.driver" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
    <entry key="db.jdbcurl" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost/world"/>
    <entry key="db.username" value="myuser"/>
    <entry key="db.password" value="mypass"/>
</util:map>

In the above example we are assigning values to properties that will be used in the configuration. For the datasource configuration:

<bean id="dataSource" 
       class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
    <property name="driverClassName" value="${db.driver}"/>
    <property name="url" value="${db.jdbcurl}"/>
    <property name="username" value="${db.username}"/>
    <property name="password" value="${db.password}"/>
</bean>

The placeholders are used to provide values for properties of this bean. This means that you can specify all the properties of the configuration in one place instead of entering the values for each property on each bean. We do, however, need one more bean to pull this all together. The last bean is responsible for actually replacing the placeholders with the property values.

<bean 
 class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
    <property name="properties" ref="dbProps"/>
</bean>

Now that we have our MySQL data source configured and ready to go, we write some Java code to access it. The example below will retrieve three random cities and their corresponding country using the data source we configured with Spring.

// Create a new application context. this processes the Spring config
ApplicationContext ctx =
    new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("ex1appContext.xml");
// Retrieve the data source from the application context
    DataSource ds = (DataSource) ctx.getBean("dataSource");
// Open a database connection using Spring's DataSourceUtils
Connection c = DataSourceUtils.getConnection(ds);
try {
    // retrieve a list of three random cities
    PreparedStatement ps = c.prepareStatement(
        "select City.Name as 'City', Country.Name as 'Country' " +
        "from City inner join Country on City.CountryCode = Country.Code " +
        "order by rand() limit 3");
    ResultSet rs = ps.executeQuery();
    while(rs.next()) {
        String city = rs.getString("City");
        String country = rs.getString("Country");
        System.out.printf("The city %s is in %s%n", city, country);
    }
} catch (SQLException ex) {
    // something has failed and we print a stack trace to analyse the error
    ex.printStackTrace();
    // ignore failure closing connection
    try { c.close(); } catch (SQLException e) { }
} finally {
    // properly release our connection
    DataSourceUtils.releaseConnection(c, ds);
}

This is very similar to normal JDBC access to MySQL with the main difference being that we are using DataSourceUtils instead of the DriverManager to create the connection.

While it may seem like a small difference, the implications are somewhat far reaching. Spring manages this resource in a way similar to a container managed data source in a J2EE application server. When a connection is opened, it can be subsequently accessed in other parts of the code if it is synchronized with a transaction. This makes it possible to treat different parts of your application as transactional instead of passing around a database connection.

23.4.5.2.4.1. Using JdbcTemplate

Spring makes extensive use of the Template method design pattern (see Template Method Pattern). Our immediate focus will be on the JdbcTemplate and related classes, specifically NamedParameterJdbcTemplate. The template classes handle obtaining and releasing a connection for data access when one is needed.

The next example shows how to use NamedParameterJdbcTemplate inside of a DAO (Data Access Object) class to retrieve a random city given a country code.

public class Ex2JdbcDao {
     /**
     * Data source reference which will be provided by Spring.
     */
     private DataSource dataSource;
        
     /**
     * Our query to find a random city given a country code. Notice
     * the ":country" parameter towards the end. This is called a
     * named parameter.
     */
     private String queryString = "select Name from City " +
        "where CountryCode = :country order by rand() limit 1";
        
     /**
     * Retrieve a random city using Spring JDBC access classes.
     */
     public String getRandomCityByCountryCode(String cntryCode) {
         // A template that allows using queries with named parameters
         NamedParameterJdbcTemplate template =
         new NamedParameterJdbcTemplate(dataSource);
         // A java.util.Map is used to provide values for the parameters
         Map params = new HashMap();
         params.put("country", cntryCode);
         // We query for an Object and specify what class we are expecting
         return (String)template.queryForObject(queryString, params, String.class);
     }
        
    /**
    * A JavaBean setter-style method to allow Spring to inject the data source.
    * @param dataSource
    */
    public void setDataSource(DataSource dataSource) {
        this.dataSource = dataSource;
    }
}

The focus in the above code is on the getRandomCityByCountryCode() method. We pass a country code and use the NamedParameterJdbcTemplate to query for a city. The country code is placed in a Map with the key "country", which is the parameter is named in the SQL query.

To access this code, you need to configure it with Spring by providing a reference to the data source.

<bean id="dao" class="code.Ex2JdbcDao">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
</bean>

At this point, we can just grab a reference to the DAO from Spring and call getRandomCityByCountryCode().

// Create the application context
    ApplicationContext ctx =
    new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("ex2appContext.xml");
    // Obtain a reference to our DAO
    Ex2JdbcDao dao = (Ex2JdbcDao) ctx.getBean("dao");
        
    String countryCode = "USA";
        
    // Find a few random cities in the US
    for(int i = 0; i < 4; ++i)
        System.out.printf("A random city in %s is %s%n", countryCode,
            dao.getRandomCityByCountryCode(countryCode));

This example shows how to use Spring's JDBC classes to completely abstract away the use of traditional JDBC classes including Connection and PreparedStatement.

23.4.5.2.4.2. Transactional JDBC Access

You might be wondering how we can add transactions into our code if we don't deal directly with the JDBC classes. Spring provides a transaction management package that not only replaces JDBC transaction management, but also allows declarative transaction management (configuration instead of code).

In order to use transactional database access, we will need to change the storage engine of the tables in the world database. The downloaded script explicitly creates MyISAM tables which do not support transactional semantics. The InnoDB storage engine does support transactions and this is what we will be using. We can change the storage engine with the following statements.

ALTER TABLE City ENGINE=InnoDB;
ALTER TABLE Country ENGINE=InnoDB;
ALTER TABLE CountryLanguage ENGINE=InnoDB;

A good programming practice emphasized by Spring is separating interfaces and implementations. What this means is that we can create a Java interface and only use the operations on this interface without any internal knowledge of what the actual implementation is. We will let Spring manage the implementation and with this it will manage the transactions for our implementation.

First you create a simple interface:

public interface Ex3Dao {
    Integer createCity(String name, String countryCode,
    String district, Integer population);
}

This interface contains one method that will create a new city record in the database and return the id of the new record. Next you need to create an implementation of this interface.

public class Ex3DaoImpl implements Ex3Dao {
    protected DataSource dataSource;
    protected SqlUpdate updateQuery;
    protected SqlFunction idQuery;
        
    public Integer createCity(String name, String countryCode,
        String district, Integer population) {
            updateQuery.update(new Object[] { name, countryCode,
                   district, population });
            return getLastId();
        }
        
    protected Integer getLastId() {
        return idQuery.run();
    }
}

You can see that we only operate on abstract query objects here and don't deal directly with the JDBC API. Also, this is the complete implementation. All of our transaction management will be dealt with in the configuration. To get the configuration started, we need to create the DAO.

<bean id="dao" class="code.Ex3DaoImpl">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
    <property name="updateQuery">...</property>
    <property name="idQuery">...</property>
</bean>

Now you need to setup the transaction configuration. The first thing you must do is create transaction manager to manage the data source and a specification of what transaction properties are required for for the dao methods.

<bean id="transactionManager" 
  class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DataSourceTransactionManager">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
</bean>
        
<tx:advice id="txAdvice" transaction-manager="transactionManager">
    <tx:attributes>
        <tx:method name="*"/>
    </tx:attributes>
</tx:advice>

The preceding code creates a transaction manager that handles transactions for the data source provided to it. The txAdvice uses this transaction manager and the attributes specify to create a transaction for all methods. Finally you need to apply this advice with an AOP pointcut.

<aop:config>
    <aop:pointcut id="daoMethods"
        expression="execution(* code.Ex3Dao.*(..))"/>
     <aop:advisor advice-ref="txAdvice" pointcut-ref="daoMethods"/>
</aop:config>

This basically says that all methods called on the Ex3Dao interface will be wrapped in a transaction. To make use of this, you only have to retrieve the dao from the application context and call a method on the dao instance.

Ex3Dao dao = (Ex3Dao) ctx.getBean("dao");
Integer id = dao.createCity(name,  countryCode, district, pop);

We can verify from this that there is no transaction management happening in our Java code and it's all configured with Spring. This is a very powerful notion and regarded as one of the most beneficial features of Spring.

23.4.5.2.4.3. Connection Pooling

In many sitations, such as web applications, there will be a large number of small database transactions. When this is the case, it usually makes sense to create a pool of database connections available for web requests as needed. Although MySQL does not spawn an extra process when a connection is made, there is still a small amount of overhead to create and setup the connection. Pooling of connections also alleviates problems such as collecting large amounts of sockets in the TIME_WAIT state.

Setting up pooling of MySQL connections with Spring is as simple as changing the data source configuration in the application context. There are a number of configurations that we can use. The first example is based on the Jakarta Commons DBCP library. The example below replaces the source configuration that was based on DriverManagerDataSource with DBCP's BasicDataSource.

<bean id="dataSource" destroy-method="close"
  class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource">
    <property name="driverClassName" value="${db.driver}"/>
    <property name="url" value="${db.jdbcurl}"/>
    <property name="username" value="${db.username}"/>
    <property name="password" value="${db.password}"/>
    <property name="initialSize" value="3"/>
</bean>

The configuration of the two solutions is very similar. The difference is that DBCP will pool connections to the database instead of creating a new connection every time one is requested. We have also set a parameter here called initialSize. This tells DBCP that we want three connections in the pool when it is created.

Another way to configure connection pooling is to configure a data source in our J2EE application server. Using JBoss as an example, you can set up the MySQL connection pool by creating a file called mysql-local-ds.xml and placing it in the server/default/deploy directory in JBoss. Once we have this setup, we can use JNDI to look it up. With Spring, this lookup is very simple. The data source configuration looks like this.

<jee:jndi-lookup id="dataSource" jndi-name="java:MySQL_DS"/>

23.4.5.3. Common Problems and Solutions

There are a few issues that seem to be commonly encountered often by users of MySQL Connector/J. This section deals with their symptoms, and their resolutions.

Questions

  • 24.4.5.3.1: When I try to connect to the database with MySQL Connector/J, I get the following exception:

    SQLException: Server configuration denies access to data source
    SQLState: 08001
    VendorError: 0

    What's going on? I can connect just fine with the MySQL command-line client.

  • 24.4.5.3.2: My application throws an SQLException 'No Suitable Driver'. Why is this happening?

  • 24.4.5.3.3: I'm trying to use MySQL Connector/J in an applet or application and I get an exception similar to:

    SQLException: Cannot connect to MySQL server on host:3306.
    Is there a MySQL server running on the machine/port you
    are trying to connect to?
    
    (java.security.AccessControlException)
    SQLState: 08S01
    VendorError: 0
  • 24.4.5.3.4: I have a servlet/application that works fine for a day, and then stops working overnight

  • 24.4.5.3.5: I'm trying to use JDBC-2.0 updatable result sets, and I get an exception saying my result set is not updatable.

  • 24.4.5.3.6: I cannot connect to the MySQL server using Connector/J, and I'm sure the connection paramters are correct.

  • 24.4.5.3.7: I am trying to connect to my MySQL server within my application, but I get the following error and stack trace:

    java.net.SocketException
    MESSAGE: Software caused connection abort: recv failed
    
    STACKTRACE:
    
    java.net.SocketException: Software caused connection abort: recv failed
    at java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Native Method)
    at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(Unknown Source)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readFully(MysqlIO.java:1392)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readPacket(MysqlIO.java:1414)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.doHandshake(MysqlIO.java:625)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.createNewIO(Connection.java:1926)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.<init>(Connection.java:452)
    at com.mysql.jdbc.NonRegisteringDriver.connect(NonRegisteringDriver.java:411)
  • 24.4.5.3.8: My application is deployed through JBoss and I am using transactions to handle the statements on the MySQL database. Under heavy loads I am getting a error and stack trace, but these only occur after a fixed period of heavy activity.

Questions and Answers

24.4.5.3.1: When I try to connect to the database with MySQL Connector/J, I get the following exception:

SQLException: Server configuration denies access to data source
SQLState: 08001
VendorError: 0

What's going on? I can connect just fine with the MySQL command-line client.

MySQL Connector/J must use TCP/IP sockets to connect to MySQL, as Java does not support Unix Domain Sockets. Therefore, when MySQL Connector/J connects to MySQL, the security manager in MySQL server will use its grant tables to determine whether the connection should be allowed.

You must add the necessary security credentials to the MySQL server for this to happen, using the GRANT statement to your MySQL Server. See Section 13.5.1.3, “GRANT Syntax”, for more information.

Note

Testing your connectivity with the mysql command-line client will not work unless you add the --host flag, and use something other than localhost for the host. The mysql command-line client will use Unix domain sockets if you use the special hostname localhost. If you are testing connectivity to localhost, use 127.0.0.1 as the hostname instead.

Warning

Changing privileges and permissions improperly in MySQL can potentially cause your server installation to not have optimal security properties.

24.4.5.3.2: My application throws an SQLException 'No Suitable Driver'. Why is this happening?

There are three possible causes for this error:

  • The Connector/J driver is not in your CLASSPATH, see Section 23.4.2, “Connector/J Installation”.

  • The format of your connection URL is incorrect, or you are referencing the wrong JDBC driver.

  • When using DriverManager, the jdbc.drivers system property has not been populated with the location of the Connector/J driver.

24.4.5.3.3: I'm trying to use MySQL Connector/J in an applet or application and I get an exception similar to:

SQLException: Cannot connect to MySQL server on host:3306.
Is there a MySQL server running on the machine/port you
are trying to connect to?

(java.security.AccessControlException)
SQLState: 08S01
VendorError: 0

Either you're running an Applet, your MySQL server has been installed with the "--skip-networking" option set, or your MySQL server has a firewall sitting in front of it.

Applets can only make network connections back to the machine that runs the web server that served the .class files for the applet. This means that MySQL must run on the same machine (or you must have some sort of port re-direction) for this to work. This also means that you will not be able to test applets from your local file system, you must always deploy them to a web server.

MySQL Connector/J can only communicate with MySQL using TCP/IP, as Java does not support Unix domain sockets. TCP/IP communication with MySQL might be affected if MySQL was started with the "--skip-networking" flag, or if it is firewalled.

If MySQL has been started with the "--skip-networking" option set (the Debian Linux package of MySQL server does this for example), you need to comment it out in the file /etc/mysql/my.cnf or /etc/my.cnf. Of course your my.cnf file might also exist in the data directory of your MySQL server, or anywhere else (depending on how MySQL was compiled for your system). Binaries created by MySQL AB always look in /etc/my.cnf and [datadir]/my.cnf. If your MySQL server has been firewalled, you will need to have the firewall configured to allow TCP/IP connections from the host where your Java code is running to the MySQL server on the port that MySQL is listening to (by default, 3306).

24.4.5.3.4: I have a servlet/application that works fine for a day, and then stops working overnight

MySQL closes connections after 8 hours of inactivity. You either need to use a connection pool that handles stale connections or use the "autoReconnect" parameter (see Section 23.4.4.1, “Driver/Datasource Class Names, URL Syntax and Configuration Properties for Connector/J”).

Also, you should be catching SQLExceptions in your application and dealing with them, rather than propagating them all the way until your application exits, this is just good programming practice. MySQL Connector/J will set the SQLState (see java.sql.SQLException.getSQLState() in your APIDOCS) to "08S01" when it encounters network-connectivity issues during the processing of a query. Your application code should then attempt to re-connect to MySQL at this point.

The following (simplistic) example shows what code that can handle these exceptions might look like:

Example 23.12. Example of transaction with retry logic

public void doBusinessOp() throws SQLException {
    Connection conn = null;
    Statement stmt = null;
    ResultSet rs = null;

    //
    // How many times do you want to retry the transaction
    // (or at least _getting_ a connection)?
    //
    int retryCount = 5;

    boolean transactionCompleted = false;

    do {
        try {
            conn = getConnection(); // assume getting this from a
                                    // javax.sql.DataSource, or the
                                    // java.sql.DriverManager

            conn.setAutoCommit(false);

            //
            // Okay, at this point, the 'retry-ability' of the
            // transaction really depends on your application logic,
            // whether or not you're using autocommit (in this case
            // not), and whether you're using transacational storage
            // engines
            //
            // For this example, we'll assume that it's _not_ safe
            // to retry the entire transaction, so we set retry
            // count to 0 at this point
            //
            // If you were using exclusively transaction-safe tables,
            // or your application could recover from a connection going
            // bad in the middle of an operation, then you would not
            // touch 'retryCount' here, and just let the loop repeat
            // until retryCount == 0.
            //
            retryCount = 0;

            stmt = conn.createStatement();

            String query = "SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY baz";

            rs = stmt.executeQuery(query);

            while (rs.next()) {
            }

            rs.close();
            rs = null;

            stmt.close();
            stmt = null;

            conn.commit();
            conn.close();
            conn = null;

            transactionCompleted = true;
        } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {

            //
            // The two SQL states that are 'retry-able' are 08S01
            // for a communications error, and 40001 for deadlock.
            //
            // Only retry if the error was due to a stale connection,
            // communications problem or deadlock
            //

            String sqlState = sqlEx.getSQLState();

            if ("08S01".equals(sqlState) || "40001".equals(sqlState)) {
                retryCount--;
            } else {
                retryCount = 0;
            }
        } finally {
            if (rs != null) {
                try {
                    rs.close();
                } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {
                    // You'd probably want to log this . . .
                }
            }

            if (stmt != null) {
                try {
                    stmt.close();
                } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {
                    // You'd probably want to log this as well . . .
                }
            }

            if (conn != null) {
                try {
                    //
                    // If we got here, and conn is not null, the
                    // transaction should be rolled back, as not
                    // all work has been done

                    try {
                        conn.rollback();
                    } finally {
                        conn.close();
                    }
                } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {
                    //
                    // If we got an exception here, something
                    // pretty serious is going on, so we better
                    // pass it up the stack, rather than just
                    // logging it. . .

                    throw sqlEx;
                }
            }
        }
    } while (!transactionCompleted && (retryCount > 0));
}

Note

Use of the autoReconnect option is not recommended because there is no safe method of reconnecting to the MySQL server without risking some corruption of the connection state or database state information. Instead, you should use a connection pool which will enable your application to connect to the MySQL server using an available connection from the pool. The autoReconnect facility is deprecated, and may be removed in a future release.

24.4.5.3.5: I'm trying to use JDBC-2.0 updatable result sets, and I get an exception saying my result set is not updatable.

Because MySQL does not have row identifiers, MySQL Connector/J can only update result sets that have come from queries on tables that have at least one primary key, the query must select every primary key and the query can only span one table (that is, no joins). This is outlined in the JDBC specification.

Note that this issue only occurs when using updatable result sets, and is caused because Connector/J is unable to guarantee that it can identify the correct rows within the result set to be updated without having a unique reference to each row. There is no requirement to have a unique field on a table if you are using UPDATE or DELETE statements on a table where you can individually specify the criteria to be matched using a WHERE clause.

24.4.5.3.6: I cannot connect to the MySQL server using Connector/J, and I'm sure the connection paramters are correct.

Make sure that the skip-networking option has not been enabled on your server. Connector/J must be able to communicate with your server over TCP/IP, named sockets are not supported. Also ensure that you are not filtering connections through a Firewall or other network security system. For more informaiton, see Section B.1.2.2, “Can't connect to [local] MySQL server.

24.4.5.3.7: I am trying to connect to my MySQL server within my application, but I get the following error and stack trace:

java.net.SocketException
MESSAGE: Software caused connection abort: recv failed

STACKTRACE:

java.net.SocketException: Software caused connection abort: recv failed
at java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Native Method)
at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(Unknown Source)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readFully(MysqlIO.java:1392)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readPacket(MysqlIO.java:1414)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.doHandshake(MysqlIO.java:625)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.createNewIO(Connection.java:1926)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.<init>(Connection.java:452)
at com.mysql.jdbc.NonRegisteringDriver.connect(NonRegisteringDriver.java:411)

The error probably indicates that you are using a older version of the Connector/J JDBC driver (2.0.14 or 3.0.x) and you are trying to connect to a MySQL server with version 4.1x or newer. The older drivers are not compatible with 4.1 or newer of MySQL as they do not support the newer authentication mechanisms.

It is likely that the older version of the Connector/J driver exists within your application directory or your CLASSPATH includes the older Connector/J package.

24.4.5.3.8: My application is deployed through JBoss and I am using transactions to handle the statements on the MySQL database. Under heavy loads I am getting a error and stack trace, but these only occur after a fixed period of heavy activity.

This is a JBoss, not Connector/J, issue and is connected to the use of transactions. Under heavy loads the time taken for transactions to complete can increase, and the error is caused because you have exceeded the predefined timeout.

You can increase the timeout value by setting the TransactionTimeout attribute to the TransactionManagerService within the /conf/jboss-service.xml file (pre-4.0.3) or /deploy/jta-service.xml for JBoss 4.0.3 or later. See TransactionTimeoute within the JBoss wiki for more information.

23.4.6. Connector/J Support

23.4.6.1. Connector/J Community Support

MySQL AB provides assistance to the user community by means of its mailing lists. For Connector/J related issues, you can get help from experienced users by using the MySQL and Java mailing list. Archives and subscription information is available online at http://lists.mysql.com/java.

For information about subscribing to MySQL mailing lists or to browse list archives, visit http://lists.mysql.com/. See Section 1.7.1, “MySQL Mailing Lists”.

Community support from experienced users is also available through the JDBC Forum. You may also find help from other users in the other MySQL Forums, located at http://forums.mysql.com. See Section 1.7.2, “MySQL Community Support at the MySQL Forums”.

23.4.6.2. How to Report Connector/J Bugs or Problems

The normal place to report bugs is http://bugs.mysql.com/, which is the address for our bugs database. This database is public, and can be browsed and searched by anyone. If you log in to the system, you will also be able to enter new reports.

If you have found a sensitive security bug in MySQL, you can send email to security_at_mysql.com.

Writing a good bug report takes patience, but doing it right the first time saves time both for us and for yourself. A good bug report, containing a full test case for the bug, makes it very likely that we will fix the bug in the next release.

This section will help you write your report correctly so that you don't waste your time doing things that may not help us much or at all.

If you have a repeatable bug report, please report it to the bugs database at http://bugs.mysql.com/. Any bug that we are able to repeat has a high chance of being fixed in the next MySQL release.

To report other problems, you can use one of the MySQL mailing lists.

Remember that it is possible for us to respond to a message containing too much information, but not to one containing too little. People often omit facts because they think they know the cause of a problem and assume that some details don't matter.

A good principle is this: If you are in doubt about stating something, state it. It is faster and less troublesome to write a couple more lines in your report than to wait longer for the answer if we must ask you to provide information that was missing from the initial report.

The most common errors made in bug reports are (a) not including the version number of Connector/J or MySQL used, and (b) not fully describing the platform on which Connector/J is installed (including the JVM version, and the platform type and version number that MySQL itself is installed on).

This is highly relevant information, and in 99 cases out of 100, the bug report is useless without it. Very often we get questions like, “Why doesn't this work for me?” Then we find that the feature requested wasn't implemented in that MySQL version, or that a bug described in a report has already been fixed in newer MySQL versions.

Sometimes the error is platform-dependent; in such cases, it is next to impossible for us to fix anything without knowing the operating system and the version number of the platform.

If at all possible, you should create a repeatable, stanalone testcase that doesn't involve any third-party classes.

To streamline this process, we ship a base class for testcases with Connector/J, named 'com.mysql.jdbc.util.BaseBugReport'. To create a testcase for Connector/J using this class, create your own class that inherits from com.mysql.jdbc.util.BaseBugReport and override the methods setUp(), tearDown() and runTest().

In the setUp() method, create code that creates your tables, and populates them with any data needed to demonstrate the bug.

In the runTest() method, create code that demonstrates the bug using the tables and data you created in the setUp method.

In the tearDown() method, drop any tables you created in the setUp() method.

In any of the above three methods, you should use one of the variants of the getConnection() method to create a JDBC connection to MySQL:

  • getConnection() - Provides a connection to the JDBC URL specified in getUrl(). If a connection already exists, that connection is returned, otherwise a new connection is created.

  • getNewConnection() - Use this if you need to get a new connection for your bug report (i.e. there's more than one connection involved).

  • getConnection(String url) - Returns a connection using the given URL.

  • getConnection(String url, Properties props) - Returns a connection using the given URL and properties.

If you need to use a JDBC URL that is different from 'jdbc:mysql:///test', override the method getUrl() as well.

Use the assertTrue(boolean expression) and assertTrue(String failureMessage, boolean expression) methods to create conditions that must be met in your testcase demonstrating the behavior you are expecting (vs. the behavior you are observing, which is why you are most likely filing a bug report).

Finally, create a main() method that creates a new instance of your testcase, and calls the run method:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
      new MyBugReport().run();
 }

Once you have finished your testcase, and have verified that it demonstrates the bug you are reporting, upload it with your bug report to http://bugs.mysql.com/.

23.4.6.3. Connector/J Change History

The Connector/J Change History (Changelog) is located with the main Changelog for MySQL. See Section E.6, “MySQL Connector/J Change History”.

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