I'm pleased to announce the completion of the native MySQL client
within Frontier, for Windows.

Frontier already supports limited MySQL access through the ODBC DLL.
This new native MySQL client within Frontier is unrelated to that DLL
and implements the MySQL client library natively within Frontier, like
I did previously with Frontier and SQLite.

Unfortunately, we don't have access to the old ODBC DLL source for
this open source Frontier Kernel project. I've also noticed that a
bunch of ODBC DLL loads and unloads seem to cause Frontier to crash
over time.

The old ODBC DLL just didn't seem like a production solution that we
could fix or debug. So, rather than tack on the old DLL, I decided to
reimplement MySQL natively. Frontier accesses the MySQL server. You'll
need to have access to a MySQL server for full functionality

The version of MySQL client embedded within the Frontier Kernel is
5.0, which, theoretically, means we only support access to MySQL
5.0.x. In practice, I've tested access to MySQL 4.x databases and have
had some success.

Actually coding was completed mostly in April, but the complete verb
set, with some background information, is now available on the
Frontieropedia at http://frontierkernel.org/docs/verbs/mysql.

Also on the Frontieropedia are the verb files for import into
Frontier, a test table, and a test database.

A vendor drop has been checked in with the MySQL library.

Finally, this should require far less work to make work on the Mac
side, since we don't have to deal with the local file weirdnesses we
did with SQLite. MySQL in Frontier uses connections to the server only.

I'd like to move this into the main trunk as soon as possible, so I'd
appreciate it if some Mac users could create the Mac build.

Have fun,
David