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 r ead 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 Par ameters 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 de veloper 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 sh ould 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 par ameter metadata, you are not connecting to server 5.5 or later, and you have specified Check Para meters then the connector will throw an InvalidOperationException indicating that you have insufficient privileges to re trieve 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 im portant 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 cachi ng here. Table Caching is a new feature that users can use to cache slow-changing dataset s on the client side. This is useful for apps that are designed to use readers but you still want to minimize trips to the ser ver 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 al so use the 'Default Table Cache Age' connection string option to specify the number of seconds a table is cached befo re 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 m emcached or velocity. Connection Failover ------------------We are introducing a new connection string keyword called 'Replication'. By sett ing 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'