New Features

• Expose Windows client authentication (#1018)

Bug Fixes

• Support more MySQL encodings and warn rather than crash on unsupported encodings (#1040)

Changes

• Precompiled mysql2 gem for Windows supports Ruby 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6. Windows Ruby 2.0 and 2.1 are dropped.
• Keyword arguments have to be explicitly double-splatted in Ruby 2.7+ (#1084)
• Add Centos to CI matrix (#989, #1085)
• Remove spec from gem (#1044)
• Replace Win32API with Fiddle, update appveyor.yml (#1053)
• Update README to clarify the protocol value in DATABASE_URL (#1047)
• Improve performance to call Mysql2::Result#each and Mysql2::Result#fields (#1046)
• Fix fragile specs due to clock skew and timeout/threads corruption (#1041)
• README updates (#1002, #1038)