JDBC anomal: java.sql.ResultSet.getFetchSize() returns zero, but resultset works fine.

This question is concerning my senior project.  (Widener University - Computer Science)  I'm using j2sdk version 1.4.2 and mysql connector J version 3.0.8 to connect a java application to a mysql database for the purpose of doing some data mining.  The project is nearly 2/3 complete, but I have run into  a snag.  For the routine that discovers sub-itemsets from my transaction table, i need to know the size of the resultset after a query.  I'm using ResultSet.getFetchSize() to accomplish this, but the method returns zero even though the ResultSet is fully populated with the correct and anticipated result.  I fear the problem may be that I'm passing the result set between classes, but I'm not really sure.  Here's the code in context:

try {
                con = db.getConnection();
                db.doUpdate(con, "DELETE FROM itemsets;");
                result = db.doQuery(con, "SELECT DISTINCT tid FROM transactions;");
                int isid = 1;
                while (result.next()) {
                    int tid = result.getInt("tid");
                    String query = "SELECT iid FROM transactions WHERE tid = " + tid + " ORDER BY indx;";
                    transRS = db.doQuery(con, query);
                    transRS.next();
                    String message = java.lang.String.valueOf(transRS.getFetchSize());
                    javax.swing.JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, message, "blah", dtype);
                    //msg box for debugging
                   
                    int startingPoint = 0;
                    while (startingPoint <= transRS.getFetchSize()) {
                        transRS.relative(startingPoint);
                        for (int i = startingPoint + 1; i == transRS.getFetchSize(); i++) {
                            for (int j = startingPoint + 1; j == i; j++) {
                                db.doUpdate(con, "INSERT INTO itemsets (isid, iid) VALUES (" + isid + ", " + transRS.getInt("iid") + ");");
                                transRS.next();
                            }
                            isid++;
                            transRS.first();
                        }
                        startingPoint++;
                    }
                    transRS.close();
                    current++;
                    Thread.sleep(1);
                }
                result.close();
                db.closeConnection(con);
            }

the "db" class you see here is a class i wrote to cut down on the size of the program, it just handles the connections and queries in a convenient way.  It's worked perfectly for many other database routines in this program, but here's the doQuery method just in case i'm doing something wrong.

/**
     *  Method to return the results of an SQL query
     */
    public java.sql.ResultSet doQuery(java.sql.Connection conn, String sql) throws java.sql.SQLException {
        try {
            stmt = conn.createStatement();
            rs = stmt.executeQuery(sql);
        } catch (java.sql.SQLException sqle) {
            // a dialog box to report the exception
            int dtype = javax.swing.JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE;
            javax.swing.JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, sqle, "SQL Exception in Method dbConnection.doQuery", dtype);
        } catch (Exception ge) {
            // a dialog box to report the exception
            int dtype = javax.swing.JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE;
            javax.swing.JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, ge, "General Exception in Method dbConnection.doQuery", dtype);
        }
       
        return rs;
    }

I Apologize for the super-sized post, but seeing the code is probably necessary.  As a last resort, i could always run a query that just counts the number of transactions, and read in the result... but this is already a query-intensive routine so I figured I'd try to get this method to work.  Thanks a lot for any help.  :)