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

If you are building Connector/J from source using the source distribution (see Section 1.2.4, “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.

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 1.2.2, “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 or a 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.

Once you have extracted the distribution archive, you can install the driver by placing mysql-connector-java-[version]-bin.jar in 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 1.5.2, “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):

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.

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

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:

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:

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:

The properties are listed in the following tables.

Connection/Authentication. 

Networking. 

High Availability and Clustering. 

Security. 

Performance Extensions. 

Debugging/Profiling. 

Miscellaneous. 

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.

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.

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. 

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(). 

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 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. 

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.

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.

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 '