What's new in this release?

Support and certification

Changes Since 6.0.0

• Enhancements
  • The driver has been enhanced to support AWS IAM authentication. When AWS IAM authentication is enabled (AuthenticationMethod=AWSIAM), you can connect with AWS IAM using the new AccessKey, Region, and SecretKey properties. See AWS IAM authentication for details.
  • The driver supports the Geography and Geometry data types with the getColumns() method.
    Feature details:

    • Available: Driver version 6.0.0.001767 (F002919.U001917)
  • The driver has been enhanced to comply with FIPS standards for data encryption. As part of this enhancement, the driver was tested with FIPS 140-3 enabled using a Red Hat OpenJDK 21 on a Red Hat Universal Base Image 9 instance. See FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) for details.
  • The driver has been enhanced to support the SCRAM-SHA-256-PLUS password hashing mechanism for user ID/password authentication. The SCRAM-SHA-256-PLUS mechanism uses channel binding to establish a secure connection with PostgreSQL (v11.0 and higher).
  • The driver has been enhanced to support Microsoft Entra ID authentication (formerly Azure Active Directory Authentication). Entra ID authentication is an alternate authentication type that allows administrators to centrally manage user permissions to Azure SQL Database data stores. The driver supports the following methods of Entra ID authentication:
    • User and password authentication
    • Service principal authentication
    See Microsoft Entra ID authentication for details.
  • The driver has been enhanced to support the TLSv1.3 cryptographic protocol. See CryptoProtocolVersion for details.
  • The driver has been enhanced to support MERGE against PostgreSQL 15 and later. MERGE is a SQL command that modifies rows in the target table using the data from the source table. It can conditionally INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE rows in a single statement, eliminating the need to write multiple procedural statements.
    Feature details:

    • Available: Driver version 6.0.0.001277 (F002097.U001111)
  • The driver has been enhanced with the new EnablePrepareThreshold and PrepareThreshold connection properties, which allow you to configure the behavior of server-side prepared statements. See EnablePrepareThreshold and PrepareThreshold for details.
• Changed behavior
  • The connection property SpyAttributes has been updated to exclude the attribute load=classname, which was previously used to load the driver specified by the given class name. See SpyAttributes for details.

Highlights of 6.0.0 Release

• The driver has been enhanced to support stored procedures for PostgreSQL 11 and later.
• The CallEscapeBehavior connection property has been added to the driver. It determines whether the driver calls a user-defined function or a stored procedure when JDBC Call escape syntax is used in a SQL statement. See CallEscapeBehavior for details.
• The driver has been enhanced to support the following types of data types:
  • Network address types
  • Monetary types
  • Date/time types
  • Range types
  Note: For more information, see Data types.
• The driver has been enhanced to support the TXID_SNAPSHOT data type.
• The driver has been enhanced to support the SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication method, which uses a hashing mechanism for encrypting passwords to establish a secure connection with PostgreSQL (v10.0 and higher). This method requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that is Java SE 8 or higher. During connection, the driver detects and uses the most secure method supported by the server. You must also provide a value for the User and Password connection properties.
• The driver has been enhanced to include timestamp in the Spy and JDBC packet logs by default. If required, you can disable the timestamp logging by specifying the following at connection: For Spy logs, set spyAttributes=(log=(file)Spy.log;timestamp=no) and for JDBC packet logs, set ddtdbg.ProtocolTraceShowTime=false.
• Interactive SQL for JDBC (JDBCISQL) is now installed with the product. JDBCISQL is a command-line interface that supports connecting your driver to a data source, executing SQL statements and retrieving results in a terminal. This tool provides a method to quickly test your drivers in an environment that does not support GUIs.

• The driver has been enhanced to support a customized version of the PostgreSQL COPY command. It provides an additional keyword, LOCALFILE, to allow you to copy data from or to standard file-system files that are stored anywhere on your network, not just on the database server. See Using COPY command for details.

• The driver has been enhanced to support the PostgreSQL COPY command for batch inserts. When BatchMechanism is set to copy, the driver leverages the PostgreSQL COPY command for substantial performance gains.
• The driver has been enhanced to support retrieving the values of auto-generated keys. See Auto-generated keys support for details.

• The driver has been enhanced to support the following data types: Citext, JSON, JSONB, and UUID.

• The driver has been enhanced to support the Kerberos authentication protocol with the following connection properties:

  • AuthenticationMethod
  • ServicePrincipalName

  See Kerberos authentication for details.

• The ExtendedColumnMetadata connection property has been added to the driver. This property determines how the driver returns column metadata when retrieving results with ResultSetMetaData methods. See ExtendedColumnMetadata for details.
• The RegisterStatementPoolMonitorMBean connection property has been added. Note that the driver no longer registers the Statement Pool Monitor as a JMX MBean by default. You must set RegisterStatementPoolMonitorMBean to true to register the Statement Pool Monitor and manage statement pooling with standard JMX API calls. See RegisterStatementPoolMonitorMBean for details.

Changed behavior

• The default value for the SupportsCatalogs connection property has been changed to true. Now, for catalog calls, such as getTables and getColumns, the driver returns the database as catalog by default. See SupportsCatalogs for details.
• Java SE 7 has reached the end of its product life cycle and will no longer receive generally available security updates. As a result, the driver will no longer support JVMs that are version Java SE 7 or earlier. Support for distributed versions of Java SE 7 and earlier will also end, including IBM SDK (Java Edition).