The newer connector may work just fine if you are creating your own ODBC DSN's for use outside of Sage 50. However, the automatically created DSN's by Sage 50 will likely still be looking for the 5.2a driver in Sage 50 versions 2014 and higher.

I've never tested others so I don't know if it will cause any errors if you get rid of the 5.2a version. Running side-by-side with 5.2a will not likely cause a problem unless Oracle specifically suggests you don't do that. That way you can use the current version or the newer one depending on your specific needs.

Richard S. Ridings said:

I don't know if it will cause any errors if you get rid of the 5.2a version.

When I tried it a couple years ago I've tried the 5.2.4 (not the '(a)' version and it stopped Sage 50 Canadian from connecting to the data at all.   The 5.2a connector is custom software from Sage The (a) after version 5.2 appears to stands for ANSI as opposed to Unicode, a non-ANSI version from MySQL probably won't work. 

So probably as long as the driver is the 5.2.4 and above, and ANSI you should be OK.  

Depending on whether your philosophy is glass 'half-full' or 'half-empty', it will stop all errors from occurring, or cause one massive one.

Randy

5.2a is the 5.02.04 driver that was available on the MySQL website and is currently listed in the change history. If it was written by Sage, the license on your system wouldn't say

MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1

Copyright (c) 1995, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates.

and it would not be listed on the MySQL website. The version we have is a commercial license but that doesn't mean it was modified by Sage.

I can see it causing problems if it didn't install because on opening, Sage 50 always sets up the ODBC DSN's (about 5 or 6 of them). If it can't find the driver, it times out because of that. Though it doesn't use the ODBC drivers directly in typical use (can't run a trace on SQL statements the last time I tried), I believe inherently, the ODBC Connector is necessary based on the MySQL documentation.

Using a more updated driver may work just fine for access to the data from other programs (eg. Excel through MSQuery, Access through ODBC linking, Crystal Reports, etc.). But the 5.2a driver should remain on the system to have the Sage 50 program function properly. I can't use the 3.51 driver on my pre-2014 older databases in Crystal but I can use the 5.2a driver on my 2013 file.

Richard S. Ridings said:

If it was written by Sage, the license on your system wouldn't say

Copyright (c) 1995, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates  Right, you are. Wrong, I was. Corrected, I stand.  I made an assumption when the default MySQL installation including the '5.2' ODBC version wouldn't work, and Sage Support pointed me to the 5.2(a) 32 bit release that did work. 

Richard S. Ridings said:

5.2a is the 5.02.04 driver that was available on the MySQL website

It's one of four, there's (a) for ANSI  and (w) for wide / UNICODE as well as 32 and 64 bit.

The 5.2.4.0 version labelled 5.2(a) is 4,884,992 bytes created 2013-01-24 at 7:01:46 PM

The 5.2.4.0 version labelled 5.2(w) is 4,882,944 bytes created 2013-01-24 at 6:46:40 PM

The 5.2.4.0 version labelled 5.2(a) is 5,709824 bytes created 2013-01-24 8:08:56 PM   (Sage 2017.1 installation)

They share a common code base so a common version number.  The Unicode release may not work properly / at all.  The 64 bit definitely won't work. 

This mentions 5.2.6 as incompatible:

https://support.na.sage.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=10086&sliceId=1

This describes ASCII vs Unicode for 5.2x releases

From dev.mysql.com/.../connector-odbc-installation.html

Users who install Connector/ODBC and register it to the ODBC manager manually can choose to install and register either one or both of the drivers; the different drivers are identified by a w (for “wide characters”) for the Unicode driver and a for the ANSI driver at the end of the library names—for example, myodbc5w.dll versus myodbc5a.dll, or libmyodbc5w.so versus libmyodbc5a.so.

And other documentation refers to the 5.3x releases as universally compatible.

So I'm going to try it, no deadlines looming.

Stuart Bailie said:

This makes me think there are bug fixes in the later versions of the MySQL Connector that break the current version of Sage 50.

More likely it's the other way 'round, there are no significant bugs in the 5.2(a) release that affect 32 bit Sage 50 on Windows, and none of the new capabilities are relevant to Sage 50.

'If it ain't broke' is the dominant philosophy in the 'big iron' world of Unix and mainframes.   Generally they don't change to the latest thing when there's no clear benefit, and a plethora of possible Bad Things that could happen.  If the 3.51 release had worked fine on Windows 8 and 10 it would probably still be there.