MySQL Forums :: JDBC and Java :: Communications link failure due to underlying exception

I think you finally hit the nail on the head. I've been looking through this issue all night, and reading this and other threads. I came to roughly the same conclusion as you just before reading your post.

It seems that CERTAIN values in the date_format() function are errroring. It's fine on MySQL 5, but breaks in MySQL 4.1. The query is fine when run manually. So, I am not sure what it is about the driver and how it interacts with MySQL 4.1.

This is most certainly a BUG. And a really lame one at that, virtually making MySQL 4.1 unusable with Java, in my opinion.

The date string I was trying for was: %W %M %e %Y %l:%i %p

I found that specifically the %W and %M cause the error. The others are just fine. WTF!? I tried this both with the 3.1 and 5.0 MySQL/J Drivers. So, it suggests it's either a bug in MySQL 4.1 or a bug in the 5.0 code that was also in the 3.1 code.

Migrating the existing system (largely in PHP) to MySQL 5 was not exactly on my plans. Bah! Anyone get specifically this error with the date strings, and resolve it with a simple configuration? Solutions where people said to catch an exception and retry it is not what I call an acceptable solution, personally. It's a hack to get around a bug.

-Alex