Date functions return strings

[chris]

Hi,
I've tried both 3.0.16 and 3.1.8 on MySQL 4.1.1 both with the same result. Any date function I perform on a column in my query will come back as a String datatype in my resultset. I even tried casting to a date in the query (even though it shouldn't be necessary).

For example....
cast(str_to_date(date_format(mydatecol, '%Y%m%d'), '%Y%m%d') as DATE)
... will return a string in my jdbc resultset.


Any ideas?
Thanks!