For what it's worth, the old Cloudscape source does include the method in the equivalent class. I tried to check whether it was dropped during contribution or sometime later by browsing the svn index (http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/db/derby/) but the svn server is down for scheduled maintenance (I must've missed an announcement).
Thanks Myrna, this is quite interesting. Infrastructure reports that the svn server is down due to two simultaneous disk failures, and may be down for a little while still. When it returns, I'll look through the svn history and see if I can learn anything. In the meantime, I filed DERBY-4062 to track this. thanks, bryan
