A fantastic day of Connector releases!

Georg and his MySQL Connectors Team today surprised the MySQL Community and most of his Sun-MySQL colleagues by releasing a "Full House" of Connector releases.

• ODBC 5.1 GA
  
• ODBC 3.51.25 GA update 
  
• Connector/.NET 5.0.9 GA update 
  
• PDO MySQLND preview 
  
• Connector/OpenOffice.org preview 
  

The ODBC 5.1 GA marks a very important milestone for the MySQL Connectors team. ODBC is one of our most popular drivers, yet it is a driver we historically have had problems supporting well. To correct the situation, much of the team has for over a year focused on this new version. A lot of hard work and sleepless nights have been spent while pushing towards this day. A Big Thank You goes to the core team behind it and all the supporters within the MySQL organization.

• Core Team: Georg Richter, Jim Winstead, Jess Balint, Lawrenty Novitsky, Eric Malossi
  
• Supporters: Kent Boortz (Build), Bogdan Degtyariov and Tonci Grgin (Support), and MC Brown (Docs)
  

The ODBC 5.1 is based on the ODBC 3.51 code, so much of the improvement work around ODBC has naturally covered this earlier version as well. I believe we have fixed close to 200-300 bugs in the 3.51 code alone in the last 15 months. We hope we now offer two solid ODBC products which matches the high quality expectations of our users and customers.

The PDO and Connector/OpenOffice.org previews are two new initiatives within the Connectors team. We recognize that part of the PHP community is interested in the benefits of PDO and naturally we want to support them well. We can thank Johannes Schlueter and Andrey Hristov for the coding work and Ulf Wendel for his vigorous testing activity in making this PDO preview happen. The OpenOffice.org support is an exciting initiative within Sun to make it easy to access MySQL Server and its schemata from the office-suite. This is an example of great cross-departmental engineering co-operation between MySQLers and other parts of Sun. Greetings to the OpenOffice.org team in Hamburg who helped us in this work!

Finally I want to highlight the great work by Reggie Burnett. Reggie is our key driver ensuring that MySQL supports well the Microsoft development community, and thanks to him MySQL is very easy to use over .Net and from Microsoft Visual Studio. Thank you for yet another Connector/.Net update that keeps the quality of this important support high.