Incompatible Change: MySQLConnection.reconnect() can be used to reconnect to the MySQL server. It accepts number of retries and an optional delay between attempts.

MySQLConnectiong.ping() is now a method and works the way the MySQL C API mysql_ping() function works: it raises an error. It can also optionally reconnect.

MySQLConnection.is_connected() now returns True when connection is available, False otherwise.

ping() and is_connected() are backwards incompatible. (Bug #13392739)

Refactored the modules connection and protocol and created a new module network. The MySQLProtocol does not keep a reference to the connection object any more and deals only with creating and parsing MySQL packets. Network interaction is now done by the MySQLConnection objects (with the exception of MySQLProtocol.read_text_result()).

Fixed metasetupinfo.py to use the Connector/Python which is being installed instead of the version already installed. (Bug #13962765)

Fixed MySQLCursor.description so it stores column names as Unicode. (Bug #13792575)

Fixed dbapi.Binary to be a bytes types for Python 3.x. (Bug #13780676)

Fixed automatic garbage collection which caused memory usage to grow over time. Note that MySQLConnection does not keep track of its cursors any longer. (Bug #13435186)

Fixed setting time zone for current MySQL session. (Bug #13395083)

Fixed setting and retrieving character set and collation. (Bug #13375632)

Fixed handling of errors after authentication for Python 3. (Bug #13364285)