sqlstring VS MySqlConnector

As a security professional, I was horrified to find out that the maintainers don't consider this a security issue, though they did promise to take this seriously and change the API when they were made aware of it in 2014 (https://github.com/mysqljs/mysql/issues/731).

So I bumped an issue, noting this is all over HN, and offered to write a pull request for the API change proposed by the maintainers:

https://github.com/mysqljs/sqlstring/issues/60

Doug agreed to accept such a request, so I just sat down to figure out the code and a reasonable upgrade plan.

Three hours later, I proudly wrote Doug this email (pasting it here because the issue and codebase are locked to non-contributors so I had to send it via email):

OK, I have a draft pull request ready. Of course, it's a big change and I expect to get a lot of feedback and have a few rounds of back and forth and fixups before it is accepted.

This is the plan as I envision it:

* Release SqlString 3.0.0 that has a new allowObjectValues parameter defaulting to false. This is a new major, so it shouldn't break anybody's code.

MySqlConnector (the most popular .NET library for MySQL, and the one that I authored) has supported protocol compression for many years: https://github.com/mysql-net/MySqlConnector/issues/31.

> I kept technical notes about the protocol, to serve as a future reference for myself and for other developers.

As someone who's written a MySQL client (in C#: https://github.com/mysql-net/MySqlConnector), I'd be very interested to see your notes. Are they available anywhere, or were they the confidential IP of your client?

> Unsurprisingly, bugs were uncovered every time a new client was added.

I've faced the same thing, from a client perspective. Every time a new server is tested (MySQL, MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, Azure Database for MySQL, etc.), I find slightly different interpretations of the protocol and have to accommodate them.

I have had the pleasure of contributing to a couple different networked drivers with very talented maintainers that I like to use as references.

One supports a wide array of Framework versions and has both Sync and Async I/O, as it must to implement the ADO.NET database driver interfaces. Reading the internals really highlight the way that .NET has evolved over the years and what must be done in each target version to maximize performance:

https://github.com/mysql-net/MySqlConnector

The other supports .NET 6 only with Async I/O only. This support policy seems to be the way that "modern" .NET development is headed, as .NET 6 will be the floor for LTS .NET (formerly .NET Core) releases in a few months. Async APIs only greatly simplify development, and make it simpler to remain performant when targeting WASM.

https://github.com/Cysharp/AlterNats

As a library maintainer, one thing I often wonder about is how to indicate .NET version support. One option would be for the major version of the library to track the major version of .NET, so if I were to publish a new library today then start with .NET 6 support and start with version number 6.0.0 instead of 1.0.0. This would limit the library to only making breaking changes when the .NET version changes though.

Use the MySqlConnector to load the data into a temp table using the bulk copy API. Both of my libraries implement the IDataReader (DbDataReader) interface, so they can be directly used with the bulk copy APIs. Then insert into the final table from the temp table filtering out rows that are already in the final table.

I'm the author of what you might call the "new" MySQL ADO.NET library: https://github.com/mysql-net/MySqlConnector

I agree with your impression that developers of the other library don't seem to be "plugged in to" the .NET ecosystem. As an independent developer (not affiliated with Oracle or Microsoft), I've been able to influence GitHub PRs that shape the ADO.NET API for .NET 6.0, just by showing up and contributing; I haven't seen anyone from the Oracle MySQL team participating. Meanwhile, they violate basic principles of the .NET Framework Design Guidelines that have been around for over a decade (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/design-guid...), which makes their library feel alien to a .NET programmer (regardless of the quality issues it might have).

e.g. this community effort of a MySQL ADO.NET provider is miles ahead of Oracle's driver.