HI again! It’s been some time since I wrote and shared some of our updates with you. My intention back then was to give you an update with every release — if only all my plans worked out! However we’ve now had 3 releases since last I shared an update with you so it’s time that I updated everyone on what we’ve been working on.
All of our connectors (well except for ODBC) implement our new X DevAPI and so I’ll briefly go over these features and then break out some of the major connector specific features included.
X DevAPI
Handling of default schema
We had some inconsistencies regarding how a default schema given on a connection string was handled by some of our connectors. If a user gives a schema on the connection string — such as this – it was expected that myschema would be the default schema set on the session. This would mean that any SQL issued against that session would work against that schema. Not all connectors were handling this the correct way.
var session = mysqlx.getSession("mysqlx://localhost/myschema")Various API standardization efforts
With many of our releases we’ll included various API standardizing efforts. We are always comparing our connectors and trying to make sure that the “core” API is essentially the same among all of them. When we see differences we schedule updates to correct those. Our goal is that if you understand the X DevAPI in one language then you can understand it in all the languages.
Prepared Statement support
With 8.0.16 we released prepared statement support when working with our X DevAPI/Document Store connectors. The first thing you may notice is that there isn’t any specific API for accessing prepared statements. This fits in with our general philosophy of letting the connectors “do the right thing” for the user rather than force the user to always write code. In this case the connector will notice that you are executing a “preparable” query more than once and will automatically make use of prepared statements for you. As of right now there is no way to configure or adjust this behavior. You should see a significant performance improvement from 8.0.15 to 8.0.16 when doing something like a loop of inserts or updates.
Connection Pooling Enhancements
An enhancement was included in 8.0.16 to improve our connection pooling by speeding how our connectors could “reset” the internal connection to the server. This is entirely an internal improvement. Developers will see this as a faster connection pool.
Connection Attributes
Connection attributes are a feature where you can pass in key value pairs when a connection is made. These values will be stored in the server performance schema and can be queried later as a way of “profiling” your application. Think of it simply as “tagging” your connections. These values can be given when the pool is created or when old style sessions are opened. Here is an example code snippet giving some connection attributes when opening an old-style session:
var session = mysqlx.getSession("mysqlx://localhost/schema
?connection-attributes=[key1=value1,key2=value2]")Connector specific Features
Now I’d like to make a quick list of some of the larger changes we made to our connectors that are *not* connected to the X DevAPI. These are not all of the changes in our connectors. Each connector puts out a release announcement giving the entire change list with each release.
- Connector/CPP
- Support for MSVC 2017
- Improved internal string handling
- Improved our CMaked-based build system
- Connector/Python
- Removed support for Django versions less then 1.11
- Connector/Net
- Can now use SSL certificates in the PEM file format
As always, we really appreciate your willingness to work with our products and look forward to your feedback.