java - MySQL JDBC Driver 5.1.33 - Time Zone Issue

Question

Some background:

I have a Java 1.6 webapp running on Tomcat 7. The database is MySQL 5.5. Previously, I was using Mysql JDBC driver 5.1.23 to connect to the DB. Everything worked. I recently upgraded to Mysql JDBC driver 5.1.33. After the upgrade, Tomcat would throw this error when starting the app.

WARNING: Unexpected exception resolving reference
java.sql.SQLException: The server timezone value 'UTC' is unrecognized or represents
  more than one timezone. You must configure either the server or JDBC driver (via
  the serverTimezone configuration property) to use a more specifc timezone value if
  you want to utilize timezone support.

Why is this happening?

Answer 1

Apparently, to get version 5.1.33 of MySQL JDBC driver to work with UTC time zone, one has to specify the serverTimezone explicitly in the connection string.

jdbc:mysql://localhost/db?useUnicode=true&useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShift=true&useLegacyDatetimeCode=false&serverTimezone=UTC