Weird JDBC Result Set behavior , Oracle 8.1.7.2 - JDK 1.2.2

[Braj Prasad]

I have a result set object, which contains the value of a string(VARCHAR2) field from the Database. When a getBoolean is called on it(this was done mistakenly for a String field), it returned a TRUE, when the DB field had a not NULL value, else it returned FALSE. This behaviour was on my windows desktop(Win2K). However, when the same piece of code was run from the Unix environment, it threw a NumberFormatException (and rightly so). Both the cases were run against the same database.
Seems to be an issue with Oracle's implementation of the JDBC drivers ? Any thoughts/views ?
Thanks
Here's the snippet of the code
------------------------------
String query = "select col1_name from table_name where primaryKeyVal=1";
// where col1_name is defined as VARCHAR2 field in Database
try{
con = DriverManager.getConnection(url,username,password);
Statement stmt = con.createStatement();
ResultSet rs= stmt.executeQuery(query);
if(rs.next())
{
boolean lbTmp = rs.getBoolean(1);
System.out.println("Boolean is : " + lbTmp);
}
rs.close();
stmt.close();
con.close();
}
catch(SQLException sqle)
{
sqle.printStackTrace();
}