getFastLong gets longs slowly

I tracked down a performance problem to the JDBC driver's getFastLong
function.

For very large long values (in particular, Long.MAX_VALUE and MIN_VALUE), a
special case in getFastLong throws an exception (FAST_NUMBER_FAILED)
because it's 19 digits rather than 18. It's then caught and reprocessed
using the regular long processing code (mostly, deferring to Long.getLong).

In the JVMs I'm using (JDK 6 and 7), the delay introduced by that exception
is substantial. It's not large on a per-instance basis but I'm sorting
through a great many records, many of which are MAX_VALUE. Several
different performance measurement tools all put the blame right there.

I compiled the code myself with larger values for that cutoff, and get a
huge performance increase.

So... is there a way I can check that change in?

And incidentally, while I'm at it... is there any reason it's storing my
long values as binary coded decimal? Can I get it to stop doing that? The
whole point of using a long rather than a string value was presumably to
have it work faster.

Thanks,
Joshua Engel