Explicitly casting to CHAR was the only thing I had to do for the new Connector/J. As I said in the comments above, any place MySQL is creating a "string" that ends up as a BLOB (instead of VARCHAR), you get a ByteArray in CF-land. GROUP_CONCAT was the primary offender for me, but any place you have a computed BLOB (and maybe a literal BLOB) it would happen. I don't use FULLTEXT indexes anywhere, so I can't offer any insight on that.

So, most desirable option would be to leave cf4.5 there (the build "footprint" would be small hence maybe more gain on the efficiency end… but if cf8 proves to be more efficient for a given app then of course migrate the app to cf8…), hence, my first attempt was to have cf4.5 and cf8 co-exist, that is, having the new CF8 to use the existing IIS web server instead of its internal web server.
Installation was supposed to be successful, the log indicated one nonfatal error of jndi port 2930 problem, but that is a FATAL failure.
Solution wasn't easily found.

So, I had to un-install and re-install, this time, tried to use cf8's internal web server, it "reluntantly" worked a bit, that is, it was able to launch cf administrator portion, however, the Migration process is a big headache, after taking forever finishing Export, it hanged forever for the Import section and it always hangs there no matter what including reboot, it's possible the design was by probably done by some stupid outsourced freaks, it won't even time out for worse case scenario… what xml configuration file(s) that I could manually change to make this damn thing to work, thank you.

I'm not running the beta player, just the latest official Linux release (9.0.whatever). It's a 32-bit stack the whole way down, so that's not the issue either. It seems to be certain movies, not all Flex apps in general, so probably some specific feature(s) in the SDK causes crashes the player, not all Flex apps in general.

I'm not sure about where to find more info on the MySQL ByteArray. With GROUP_CONCAT in particular, the link that Neculai posted (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/group-by-functions.html) has a bit of info. In a nutshell, any time a computation in MySQL returns a BLOB (or a BINARY CHAR), it comes back into CF as Java ByteArray, which CF can't handle correctly. So you have to recast it to a character string, either in the SQL or in CF. The former is 'CAST(expr AS CHAR)', and the latter would be 'createObject("java", "java.lang.String").init(expr)'.

Thanks,
Jason

Looking over the docs, I see you're probably correct, as long as the max length setting is 512 or less. I set it higher, because some of the lists I need are quite a bit longer than that, so it returns BLOB regardless. And I almost always have an ORDER BY clause in there anyway, so I wouldn't have noticed a change at the 5.0.19 boundary anyway.

I'm not really sure why the return type isn't VARCHAR for 512 and less, and then TEXT for larger strings (instead of BLOB). It's character data, so using BLOB seems weird, but oh well.

Thanks