Connector/Net 6.

4 Release Notes
------------------------------------

Welcome to the release notes for Connector/Net 6.4

What's new in 6.4

--------------------

- Support for Windows authentication in the driver

- Support for table caching (see below)
- Improved SQL generation from the Entity Framework provider
- Connection failover support

What we know is broken

----------------------
- Documentation has not been updated yet.
- The Generated Database Wizard will save the file with the extension .sql. You
will need to
manually change the extension to .mysql to use the new editor.

What we changed in 6.3.7 that came over to 6.4

------------------------
We introduced a slight change in behavior with 6.3.7. We did this as part of a
larger change to address a performance
issue. It's a relatively minor change in behavior however we encourage you to read
this section carefully and review your
application for areas that might be affected.

We have made the Use Procedure Bodies flag obsolete and introduced the Check
Parameters option. They server mainly the
same purpose. The Check Parameters option is true by default. Setting to false
tells
Connector/Net to not fetch any routine or parameter metadata and to simply trust
what the user has specified. This can greatly
increase performance but it also puts significant pressure on the application
developer to give the parameters in the right
order.

The next change in behavior is that Connector/Net no longer allows you to call a
stored function without specifying a return value.
We are now using the presence of a return value parameter as a signal that we
should execute the routine as a stored function. If
you don't care about the return value, then give a place holder value.

The next change is that if you user has insufficient permissions to retrieve
parameter metadata,
you are not connecting to server 5.5 or later, and you have specified Check
Parameters then the connector will throw an
InvalidOperationException indicating that you have insufficient privileges to
retrieve routine parameter metadata. In the past the
connector would silently use the parameters you gave on the command.

We apologize for introducing these changes in a GA product but we felt it was

important as these changes greatly increase the
speed that we execute stored routines.

Table Caching
-------------
We have not yet updated the documentation so we write a few words on table caching
here.

Table Caching is a new feature that users can use to cache slow-changing datasets
on the client side. This is useful for apps
that are designed to use readers but you still want to minimize trips to the server
for slow-changing tables.

It is transparent to the user. It is not enabled by default.

To enable caching, add 'table cache=true' to your connection string. You can also
use the 'Default Table Cache Age'
connection string option to specify the number of seconds a table is cached before
being discarded. You can also
set caching and cache age options on a per command basis. Please note that the
cache age property is in "seconds".

In the future we may extend this feature to allow the end user to provide their own
implementation or we may provide
an implementation of table caching that can take advantage of services such as
memcached or velocity.

Connection Failover
-------------------
We are introducing a new connection string keyword called 'Replication'. By setting
this to yes or true you
are indicating that this connection will use a set of replicated servers. With
this release replicated servers
are only supported on TCP/IP connections and it supports connection failover on the
initial connection.

The servers are specified comma-separated. An example would be

'server=server1,server2,server3; replication=yes'