Changed all ResultSet fields to Strings, this should allow Unicode to work, but your JVM must be able to convert between the character sets. This should also make reading data from the server be a bit quicker, because there is now no conversion from StringBuffer to String.

Changed PreparedStatement.streamToString() to be more efficient (code from Uwe Schaefer).

URL parsing is more robust (throws SQL exceptions on errors rather than NullPointerExceptions)

PreparedStatement now can convert Strings to Time/Date values via setObject() (code from Robert Currey).

IO no longer hangs in Buffer.readInt(), that bug was introduced in 1.1d when changing to all byte-arrays for result sets. (Pointed out by Samo Login)