Establish a connection between compatible programs on your PC and a MySQL database of your choice. Manually or automatically define a set of function calls, error codes and data types used in order to develop database-independent programs, and save the settings.
MySQL Connector/ODBC 3.5 provides a fast and reliable way for connecting with a MySQL database server via ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity, a standard method to connect a DBMS - DataBase Management System - with the database server).
ODBC is a standard implementation created by Microsoft Corporation, which is aimed at making it independent from database systems and programming languages or products, and at running in any operating system. Sun Microsystems has a similar implementation for Java called JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity).
For example, with the MySQL Connector for ODBC you can use Microsoft Excel to query the MySQL server and retrieve the necessary data to populate a spreadsheet, or to build a dynamic table. To do this, first you need to configure a DSN (data source name) in the Windows Control Panel, under the "Data Sources (ODBC)" section.
When adding a new DSN, you must specify the connection parameters, like host, user, password, default database to use, and other connection properties.
v5.1.9 [Mar 3, 2008]
Functionality Added or Changed
A new connection option, prefetch, allows applications to scroll through large query result sets, N records at a time. See Section 21.1.4.2, “Connector/ODBC Connection Parameters” for details.
Bugs Fixed
The SQLTables() function did not return the catalog correctly if the wildcard or SQL_ALL_CATALOGS was used. (Bug #13914518)
The fraction member in SQL_TIMESTAMP_STRUCT was always set to 0 when a timestamp was retrieved using SQLGetData(). The fix causes the fraction member to be correctly set, with a value representing nanoseconds. This issue did not occur when a result was retrieved as a string (SQLGetData() with SQL_C_CHAR). (Bug #12767740, Bug #60646)
Fractional seconds part of timestamp was ignored in prepared statements that use SQLBindParameter and SQL_C_TIMESTAMP type. For example, a prepared query comparing two timestamp values that only differed in the fractional part would consider the values identical. (Bug #12767761, Bug #60648)
On Windows platforms, some memory was leaked on each connection attempt due to an incorrect response to a SQLGetDiagRec() call. (Bug #11766029, Bug #59059)
Feature-rich relational database known for its high performance and excellent concurrency
