Applications that use legacy MySQL connections can now establish connections without passwords for accounts that use the authentication_oci server-side authentication plugin, provided that the correct configuration entries are available to map to one unique user in a specific Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy.

To ensure correct account mapping, the client-side Oracle Cloud Infrastructure configuration must contain a fingerprint of the API key to use for authentication (fingerprint entry) and the location of a PEM file with the private part of the API key (key_file entry). Both entries should be specified in the [DEFAULT] profile of the configuration file.

Unless an alternative path to the configuration file is specified with the new OCI_CONFIG_FILE connection option, the following default locations are used:

If the MySQL user name is not provided as a connection option, then the operating system user name is substituted. Specifically, if the private key and correct Oracle Cloud Infrastructure configuration are present on the client side, then a connection can be made without giving any options. (WL #14709)

In Connector/ODBC 8.0.26, the capability was introduced for applications that use the classic MySQL connections for accounts that use the authentication_kerberos server-side authentication plugin, provided that the correct Kerberos tickets are available or can be obtained from Kerberos. That capability was available on client hosts running Linux only. It is now available on client hosts running Windows.

For more information about Kerberos authentication, see Kerberos Pluggable Authentication. (WL #14681)

Changed the NO_SCHEMA default value from 0 to 1. It's enabled to behave like in the older versions the ODBC driver to not accept schema parameters and not declare support for schema functions. (Bug #33300344, Bug #32925338, WL #14490)

The MSI installation package did not install plugin libraries present in the Zip package, such as fido_client, kerberos_client, and ldap_sasl_client. (Bug #33269861)

Fixed the internal character set conversions of string data inside the driver; some UTF8MB4 characters were not properly converted. (Bug #33241697, Bug #104346)

The ODBC driver can now load plugins from their default location without need to specify the plugins directory using the PLUGIN_DIR connection option. (Bug #33134373)

Added logic to correctly detect OUT/INOUT parameters from a stored procedure, as a workaround to a libmysqlclient issue. (Bug #30578291)

The second call to a stored procedure failed if the statement was closed after the results of the first call had been received. (Bug #29042032, Bug #93378)