Re: Gamma?

[Reggie Burnett]

It is an evolution to ByteFX and normally I would agree with you. However, when you have a certain behavior that directly interferes with the server, then I think that should be corrected and that means changing existing behavior. To make it easier to handle if you have lots of preexisting code, adding a single option to your connection string gets everything going again. When you have competing behaviors, you have to decide which behavior is the desired one and "suggest" to everyone they do it that way. I am "suggesting" to everyone that they use "?" to mark their parameters.

The ? versus @ has nothing to do with the platform. @ can be used for named parameters with dbs like Oracle and SQL Server because they don't use @ in literal SQL to mean anything. No conflict. In MySQL it is different. Given the following SQL script, tell me how the driver would know which is user variables and which is parameters:

ser @myvar=5; select * from mytable where id=@myvar and id2 = @myparam

About the value types, it is possible that they could be handled more efficiently and I am always working to try and improve the code. There are several reasons these objects are used:

1. Reduces boxing penalty
2. Allows me to add new data types very easily
3. Keeps me from having to run through a switch statement of types for every row/column retrieved
4. Each type hides the complexity of serializing/deserializing their data on and off the wire
5. most importantly, there are data types that are supported by the server that are not supported by .NET. Types such as geometry. DateTime ranges on MySQL don't match datetime ranges in .NET. Without these types you lose access to this functionality

If you have specific suggestions, feel free to email them to the list. We always welcome input and patches

-reggie