PreparedStatement#setString on non-string parameters

Hello all,

I have just finished a few hours of testing our product that already runs on
Oracle, SQLServer, MySQL, MaxDB and McKOI on PostgreSQL. I always liked what
I read about this database apart from the fact that it used to not run
natively on Windows. Since many of our customers run Windows servers I never
bothered with PostgreSQL before.

However, starting with version 8 there is a native Windows version which I
installed and ran our product on. At first everything was fine and I was
very impressed with both the performance as the ease of use of the admin
tools.

But when I starting doing writes to the database SQL exceptions started to
occur. They where all over the application code but where all the same
error: doing a setString on a numeric parameter. I know this is usually
suboptimal but since we handle a lot of XML data throughout the (heavily
distributed) application many numeric values are available as Strings so it
would be a matter of converting them to numeric values ourselves or letting
the JDBC driver do that.

The JDBC drivers we used for the other databasse I mentioned never
complained. Unfortunately PostgreSQL does. I read somewhere that using the
pre-version-8 JDBC driver will work with 8 and not show this behaviour, the
8 driver has deliberately changed the behaviour.

The JDBC spec requires the driver to attempt a conversion when a
setString is done on a non-string parameter. This will break a lot of
conformant code, not only ours. Is there any chance this can be corrected?

Regards,

Silvio Bierman