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There are a few issues that seem to be commonly encountered often by users of MySQL Connector/J. This section deals with their symptoms, and their resolutions.

27.3.5.1.1:

Question:

When I try to connect to the database with MySQL Connector/J, I get the following exception:

SQLException: Server configuration denies access to data source
SQLState: 08001
VendorError: 0

What's going on? I can connect just fine with the MySQL command-line client.

Answer:

MySQL Connector/J must use TCP/IP sockets to connect to MySQL, as Java does not support Unix Domain Sockets. Therefore, when MySQL Connector/J connects to MySQL, the security manager in MySQL server will use its grant tables to determine whether the connection should be allowed.

You must add grants to allow this to happen. The following is an example of how to do this (but not the most secure).

From the mysql command-line client, logged in as a user that can grant privileges, issue the following command:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON [dbname].* to
                '[user]'@'[hostname]' identified by
                '[password]'

replacing [dbname] with the name of your database, [user] with the user name, [hostname] with the host that MySQL Connector/J will be connecting from, and [password] with the password you want to use. Be aware that RedHat Linux is broken with respect to the hostname portion for the case when you are connecting from localhost. You need to use "localhost.localdomain" for the [hostname] value in this case. Follow this by issuing the "FLUSH PRIVILEGES" command.

27.3.5.1.2:

Question:

My application throws an SQLException 'No Suitable Driver'. Why is this happening?

Answer:

One of two things are happening. Either the driver is not in your CLASSPATH or your URL format is incorrect (see the Section 26.3.2, “Installing Connector/J” section.).

27.3.5.1.3:

Question:

I'm trying to use MySQL Connector/J in an applet or application and I get an exception similar to:

SQLException: Cannot connect to MySQL server on host:3306.
Is there a MySQL server running on the machine/port you
are trying to connect to?

(java.security.AccessControlException)
SQLState: 08S01
VendorError: 0 

Answer:

Either you're running an Applet, your MySQL server has been installed with the "--skip-networking" option set, or your MySQL server has a firewall sitting in front of it.

Applets can only make network connections back to the machine that runs the web server that served the .class files for the applet. This means that MySQL must run on the same machine (or you must have some sort of port re-direction) for this to work. This also means that you will not be able to test applets from your local file system, you must always deploy them to a web server.

MySQL Connector/J can only communicate with MySQL using TCP/IP, as Java does not support Unix domain sockets. TCP/IP communication with MySQL might be affected if MySQL was started with the "--skip-networking" flag, or if it is firewalled.

If MySQL has been started with the "--skip-networking" option set (the Debian Linux package of MySQL server does this for example), you need to comment it out in the file /etc/mysql/my.cnf or /etc/my.cnf. Of course your my.cnf file might also exist in the data directory of your MySQL server, or anywhere else (depending on how MySQL was compiled for your system). Binaries created by MySQL AB always look in /etc/my.cnf and [datadir]/my.cnf. If your MySQL server has been firewalled, you will need to have the firewall configured to allow TCP/IP connections from the host where your Java code is running to the MySQL server on the port that MySQL is listening to (by default, 3306).

27.3.5.1.4:

Question:

I have a servlet/application that works fine for a day, and then stops working overnight

Answer:

MySQL closes connections after 8 hours of inactivity. You either need to use a connection pool that handles stale connections or use the "autoReconnect" parameter (see Section 26.3.3.1, “Driver/Datasource Class Names, URL Syntax and Configuration Properties for Connector/J”).

Also, you should be catching SQLExceptions in your application and dealing with them, rather than propagating them all the way until your application exits, this is just good programming practice. MySQL Connector/J will set the SQLState (see java.sql.SQLException.getSQLState() in your APIDOCS) to "08S01" when it encounters network-connectivity issues during the processing of a query. Your application code should then attempt to re-connect to MySQL at this point.

The following (simplistic) example shows what code that can handle these exceptions might look like:

public void doBusinessOp() throws SQLException {
        Connection conn = null;
        Statement stmt = null;
        ResultSet rs = null;

        //
        // How many times do you want to retry the transaction
        // (or at least _getting_ a connection)?
        //
        int retryCount = 5;

        boolean transactionCompleted = false;

        do {
            try {
                conn = getConnection(); // assume getting this from a
                                        // javax.sql.DataSource, or the
                                        // java.sql.DriverManager

                conn.setAutoCommit(false);

                //
                // Okay, at this point, the 'retry-ability' of the
                // transaction really depends on your application logic,
                // whether or not you're using autocommit (in this case
                // not), and whether you're using transacational storage
                // engines
                //
                // For this example, we'll assume that it's _not_ safe
                // to retry the entire transaction, so we set retry count
                // to 0 at this point
                //
                // If you were using exclusively transaction-safe tables,
                // or your application could recover from a connection going
                // bad in the middle of an operation, then you would not
                // touch 'retryCount' here, and just let the loop repeat
                // until retryCount == 0.
                //
                retryCount = 0;

                stmt = conn.createStatement();

                String query = "SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY baz";

                rs = stmt.executeQuery(query);

                while (rs.next()) {
                }

                rs.close();
                rs = null;

                stmt.close();
                stmt = null;

                conn.commit();
                conn.close();
                conn = null;

                transactionCompleted = true;
            } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {

                //
                // The two SQL states that are 'retry-able' are 08S01
                // for a communications error, and 40001 for deadlock.
                //
                // Only retry if the error was due to a stale connection,
                // communications problem or deadlock
                //

                String sqlState = sqlEx.getSQLState();

                if ("08S01".equals(sqlState) || "40001".equals(sqlState)) {
                    retryCount--;
                } else {
                    retryCount = 0;
                }
            } finally {
                if (rs != null) {
                    try {
                        rs.close();
                    } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {
                        // You'd probably want to log this . . .
                    }
                }

                if (stmt != null) {
                    try {
                        stmt.close();
                    } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {
                        // You'd probably want to log this as well . . .
                    }
                }

                if (conn != null) {
                    try {
                        //
                        // If we got here, and conn is not null, the
                        // transaction should be rolled back, as not
                        // all work has been done

                        try {
                            conn.rollback();
                        } finally {
                            conn.close();
                        }
                    } catch (SQLException sqlEx) {
                        //
                        // If we got an exception here, something
                        // pretty serious is going on, so we better
                        // pass it up the stack, rather than just
                        // logging it. . .

                        throw sqlEx;
                    }
                }
            }
        } while (!transactionCompleted && (retryCount > 0));
    }

27.3.5.1.5:

Question:

I'm trying to use JDBC-2.0 updatable result sets, and I get an exception saying my result set is not updatable.

Answer:

Because MySQL does not have row identifiers, MySQL Connector/J can only update result sets that have come from queries on tables that have at least one primary key, the query must select every primary key and the query can only span one table (that is, no joins). This is outlined in the JDBC specification.