Mysql2

Mysql2 is a modern, simple and very fast Mysql library for Ruby - binding to
libmysql.

The Mysql2 gem is meant to serve the extremely common use-case of connecting,
querying and iterating on results.  Some database libraries out there serve as
direct 1:1 mappings of the already complex C API's available.  This one is
not.

It also forces the use of UTF-8 (or binary) for the connection (and all
strings in 1.9, unless Encoding.default_internal is set then it'll convert
from UTF-8 to that encoding) and uses encoding-aware MySQL API calls where it
can.