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.
v5.2.7 [Jul 4, 2012]
Functionality Added or Changed
--The new connection option can_handle_exp_pwd indicates that your application includes error-handling logic to deal with the error code for an expired password. See Connector/ODBC Connection Parameters for the details of this connection option and the associated SQL state and native error code. See ALTER USER Syntax for details about password expiration for MySQL server accounts.
--This option is added to the Windows GUI, through a checkbox Can Handle Expired Password on the Connection tab of the Details dialog.
--The following reserved words were added to the list returned by the SQLGetInfo() ODBC function, for compatibility with the latest MySQL 5.6 syntax:
-GET
-IO_AFTER_GTIDS
-IO_BEFORE_GTIDS
-MASTER_BIND
-ONE_SHOT
-PARTITION
-SQL_AFTER_GTIDS
-SQL_BEFORE_GTIDS
Bugs Fixed
--When a column with type TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, or LONGTEXT was retrieved from a table with a binary collation, the text fields were converted to a hexadecimal representation, even though these values were not really BLOBs. The unnecessary conversion could expand the data, causing overflow problems when storing the result values.
Feature-rich relational database known for its high performance and excellent concurrency
