Better Documentation (in progress), in doc/mm.doc/book1.html

DBMD now allows null for a column name pattern (not in spec), which it changes to '%'.

DBMD now has correct types/lengths for getXXX().

ResultSet.getDate(), getTime(), and getTimestamp() fixes. (contributed by Alan Wilken)

EscapeProcessor now handles \{ \} and { or } inside quotes correctly. (thanks to Alik for some ideas on how to fix it)

Fixes to properties handling in Connection. (contributed by Juho Tikkala)

ResultSet.getObject() now returns null for NULL columns in the table, rather than bombing out. (thanks to Ben Grosman)

ResultSet.getObject() now returns Strings for types from MySQL that it doesn't know about. (Suggested by Chris Perdue)

Removed DataInput/Output streams, not needed, 1/2 number of method calls per IO operation.

Use default character encoding if one is not specified. This is a work-around for broken JVMs, because according to spec, EVERY JVM must support "ISO8859_1", but they do not.

Fixed Connection to use the platform character encoding instead of "ISO8859_1" if one isn't explicitly set. This fixes problems people were having loading the character- converter classes that didn't always exist (JVM bug). (thanks to Fritz Elfert for pointing out this problem)

Changed MysqlIO to re-use packets where possible to reduce memory usage.

Fixed escape-processor bugs pertaining to {} inside quotes.