Hi, I'm having some problems switching one of our Java/Glassfish-based web applications over from MySQL to to MariaDB. Since the MariaDB project advertises the software as a fully compatible drop- in replacement for MySQL, the first thing I did was simply stop the MySQL server, uninstall it, and then install and start MariaDB (5.5.28a, from Gentoo portage). We have got several C/C++ based application that access our MySQL databases. Those took a recompile, but afterwards continued to work as if nothing had happened. I didn't have as much luck with our glassfish-based web frontend though. The first problem was that the existing MySQL connector is apparently unable to connect to MariaDB, so I deleted the existing JDBC Connection Pools and replaced them with new ones using the MariaDB Java Client instead. This worked on the surface, however now I'm getting a lot of exceptions whenever I'm accessing parts of the application that make use of BINARY type columns. According to the developer (of the web application on question), this is because either MariaDB itself or the connector are returning binary columns as type string, causing the persistance layer to attempt to convert them to a string object. Since the binary columns in question contain various unprintable characters, including zero-bytes, this fails. Can someone please help me with these problems? Guido