The error message raised when a connection pool has no more connections available now indicates “pool exhausted” rather than “queue is empty”. (Bug #17406263)

Previously, instantiating a cursor for prepared statements was done using MySQLConnection.cursor(cursor_class=MySQLCursorPrepared). Now this can be done using MySQLConnection.cursor(prepared=True). (Bug #17215197)

Previously, setting a custom converter class was possible after instantiating a new connection object. The connect() method now accepts a converter_class connection argument that takes a class and sets it when configuring the connection. An AttributeError is raised if the custom converter class is not a subclass of conversion.MySQLConverterBase. (Bug #13551483)

The connect() method now accepts a boolean compress={False|True} argument indicating whether to use the compressed client/server protocol (default False). This provides an easier alternative to setting the ClientFlag.COMPRESS flag. (Bug #13369592)

In some cases, when a Connector/Python application exited, a RuntimeError was raised when using Python 3. (Bug #17424009)

cmd_shutdown() did not work correctly when a server for MySQL 5.6 or higher raised a DatabaseError (1835: Malformed communication packet). (Bug #17422299)

Attempts to change the size of an existing connection pool were not rejected. (Bug #17372107)

The DatabaseOperations.last_executed_query() method in the Django base module was unnecessarily decoding the string, resulting in an error when using Python 3. (Bug #70324, Bug #17473273)