4.1 Introduction to MySQL Connector/NET

MySQL Connector/NET enables you to develop .NET applications that require secure, high-performance data connectivity with MySQL. It implements the required ADO.NET interfaces and integrates into ADO.NET-aware tools. You can build applications using your choice of .NET languages. Connector/NET is a fully managed ADO.NET data provider written in 100% pure C#. It does not use the MySQL C client library.

Connector/NET source code and tests are available from the NuGet Gallery and GitHub. For notes detailing the changes in each release of Connector/NET, see MySQL Connector/NET Release Notes.

Connector/NET includes full support for:

• Features provided by MySQL Server, up to and including the MySQL 9.1 release series.

• MySQL as a document store (NoSQL), along with X Protocol connection support to access MySQL data using X Plugin ports.

• Large-packet support for sending and receiving rows and BLOB values up to 2 gigabytes in size.

• Protocol compression, which enables compressing the data stream between the client and server.

• Connections using TCP/IP sockets, named pipes, or shared memory on Windows.

• Connections using TCP/IP sockets or Unix sockets on Unix.

• Encrypted connections using:

  • TLSv1.2 protocol over TCP/IP with Connector/NET 8.0.11 and later.

  • TLSv1.3 protocol over TCP/IP with Connector/NET 8.0.20 and later.

• .NET Standard and runs on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) .NET implementation.

• Entity Framework 6 and Entity Framework Core to migrate data to and from MySQL data tables.

• The Open Source Mono framework developed by Novell.

Connector/NET supports Microsoft Visual Studio 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019, although the extent of support may be limited depending on the versions of Connector/NET and Visual Studio you use. For details, see Section 4.2, “Connector/NET Versions”.

Key Topics

• For connection string properties when using the MySqlConnection class, see Section 4.4.5, “Connector/NET Connection Options Reference”.