What does it mean when Statement.executeUpdate() returns -1?

As the statement executed is not actually DML (eg UPDATE, INSERT or EXECUTE), but a piece of T-SQL which contains DML, I suspect it is not treated as an update-query.

Section 13.1.2.3 of the JDBC 4.1 specification states something (rather hard to interpret btw):

When the method execute returns true, the method getResultSet is called to
retrieve the ResultSet object. When execute returns false, the method
getUpdateCount returns an int. If this number is greater than or equal to zero, it
indicates the update count returned by the statement. If it is -1, it indicates that there
are no more results.

Given this information, I guess that executeUpdate() internally does an execute(), and then – as execute() will return false – it will return the value of getUpdateCount(), which in this case – in accordance with the JDBC spec – will return -1.

This is further corroborated by the fact 1) that the Javadoc for Statement.executeUpdate() says:

Returns: either (1) the row count for SQL Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements or (2) 0 for SQL statements that return nothing

And 2) that the Javadoc for Statement.getUpdateCount() specifies:

the current result as an update count; -1 if the current result is a ResultSet object or there are no more results

Just to clarify: given the Javadoc for executeUpdate() the behavior is probably wrong, but it can be explained.

Also as I commented elsewhere, the -1 might just indicate: maybe something was changed, but we simply don’t know, or we can’t give an accurate number of changes (eg because in this example it is a piece of T-SQL that is executed).