connector/odbc 3.51.20 and 5.1.0

another month, another release of connector/odbc 3.51. there’s not a lot of bug fixes in this one, but we did manage to get the bug count under 80 bugs.

the reason there were fewer bug fixes in the release of 3.51.20 (other than there being fewer bugs to fix) was that we have been hard at work on connector/odbc 5.1.0, which builds on the 3.51 foundation to bring new functionality like unicode and descriptor support. there are more features planned, and you can see the release announcement for details. i hope that we’ll be able to keep on releasing new versions of 3.51 and 5.1 on a monthly basis.

connector/odbc 5.0 has met the same fate as the aborted 3.52 and 3.53 releases. it was an ambitious ground-up rewrite of the driver, but once we had put renewed efforts into getting the 3.51 code into better shape, it became clear that doing the same for a completely different code-base made little sense. we are going to be cherry-picking some of the 5.0 code for some of the new features.

i am sorry that we have been secretive about what was up with the future of 5.0, but we decided it was better to not talk about what was happening until we were confident about the decision to kill it.