> I have the following result:
>

|> with the property | without the property

> ----+-----------------------+-------------------------
> (A) | NullPointerException | unicode data OK
> (B) | unicode data OK | unicode data garbaged
>
> I think the result is OK except the NullPointerException. It may be a
> bug. The server.log for the NullPointerException is as follows:

NPE happens when Java name for the connection charset ("encoding" property)
and platform-default encoding ($LANG for example) match
(UNICODE_FSS->UTF-8). The only workaround is to make them different.

From the code I see that issue is fixed in JayBird 2.0, but it is also worth
to release 1.5.6 update with a fix.

Also I will release RC3 today that includes fix for the issue you discovered
with your test case. Probably I will release 1.5.6 today too.

Thanks!
Roman