There are certain situations where MySQL will return incorrect metadata about one or more columns. More specifically, the server will sometimes report that a column is binary when it is not and vice versa. In these situations, it becomes practically impossible for the connector to be able to correctly identify the correct metadat.

Some examples of situations that may return incorrect metadata are:

With the availability of BINARY and VARBINARY data types, it is important that we respect the metadata returned by the sever. However, we are aware that some existing applications may break with this change, so we are creating a connection string option to enable or disable it. By default, Connector/Net 5.1 respects the binary flags returned by the server. You might need to make small changes to your application to accommodate this change.

In the event that the changes required to your application would be too large, you can add 'respect binary flags=false' to your connection string. This causes the connector to use the prior behavior. In a nutshell, that behavior was that any column that is marked as string, regardless of binary flags, will be returned as string. Only columns that are specifically marked as a BLOB will be returned as BLOB.