Monday, October 2, 2006

MySQL Connector/Net 5.0.1 has been released.

MySQL Connector/Net 5.0.1 Beta has been released. MySQL Connector/Net is an all-managed ADO.Net provider for MySQL. While this release is suitable for any version of MySQL, it is strongly encouraged that this release not be used on any production data. This release is feature complete with the exception of DTC support in System.Transactions.

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.0.html and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Highlights in this release:

Support for ADO.Net 2.0 interfaces and subclasses
(this release now includes foreign key support)

Re-architected to improve speed and flexibility

The internals of the provider have been improved to allow column values to be retrieved without boxing in many cases. Also, the internal changes have enabled the future inclusion of embedded and client library support.

Implemented Usage Advisor
The Usage Advisor first appeared in Connector/J. We have now implemented that feature in Connector/Net. Enabling it causes the provider to check both your queries and how you read the results and report to you if it thinks you are using the provider in an inefficient manner. It checks such things as using a query without an index, not reading all the columns or rows from a resultset, etc.

Implemented asynchronous query methods
The MySqlCommand object now supports asynchronous queries. This is implemented using the BeginExecuteNonQuery and EndExecuteNonQuery methods. BeginExecuteReader and EndExecuteReader are now included.

Implemented stored procedure metadata caching
We now cache the metadata that is retrieved during stored procedure and stored function execution. This cache data is used for subsequent executions of that stored routine.

Added PerfMon hooks
This release includes PerfMon hooks to monitor stored procedure cache hits and misses. We are looking at adding additional hooks in the first beta release.

Removed use of SharpZipLib library
We have replaced use of the SharpZipLib library with the deflate support available with .NET 2.0.

Support for embedded server and client library has been removed
For those of you that have seen my presentations on 5.0, we decided to remove these features to help get 5.0 out the door more quickly. These features will reappear in a later version of the product.

The installer for this release installs the assembly into the GAC and registers the provider with machine.config. Because of this, you need to run the installer as a member of the administrators role. There is also a bug known in this release that applications using this build of the connector, when run on Vista, require administrator mode. We are looking into this issue for the next release.

1 comment:

  1. Hmm... still GPL-ed, no thanks.

    What's even more odd is that MySql still asks you to buy licenses at their online shop if you don't want to use the GPL-ed version and need a non-GPLed version. However, their shop doesn't enlist the .net provider as an item you can buy. (or I'm seriously overlooking it).

    I truly fail to see why a db vendor asks money for a connector to access the DB they want you to use. MySql is the only db vendor I know of who asks money for the connector alone.

    I think it should be licensed with the LGPL, this way more people will be able to use MySql's own provider without problems. The current GPL licensing just causes problems for a lot of people and is also the reason why we use the corelab provider in our o/r mapper.

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