How does the MySQL JDBC driver handle prepared statements

Prepared statement types While researching for the Statement Caching chapter in my High-Performance Java Persistence book, I got the chance to compare how Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL handle prepare statements. Thanks to Jess Balint (MySQL JDBC driver contributor), who gave a wonderful answer on StackOverflow, I managed to get a better understanding of how MySQL handles prepared statements from a database performance point of view.