A MySqlCommand has the CommandText and CommandType properties associated with it. The CommandText will be handled differently depending on the setting of CommandType. CommandType can be one of:

The default CommandType, Text, is used for executing queries and other SQL commands. Some example of this can be found in the following section Section 20.2.4.1.2, “The MySqlCommand Object”.

If CommandType is set to StoredProcedure, CommandText should be set to the name of the Stored Procedure to access.

If CommandType is set to TableDirect, all rows and columns of the named table will be returned when you call one of the Execute methods. In effect, this command performs a SELECT * on the table specified. The CommandText property is set to the name of the table you wish to query. This is illustrated by the following code snippet:

...
MySqlCommand cmd = new MySqlCommand();
cmd.CommandText = "mytable";
cmd.Connection = someConnection;
cmd.CommandType = CommandType.TableDirect;
SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader();
while (reader.Read())
{
   Console.WriteLn(reader[0], reader[1]...);
}
...

Examples of using the CommandType of StoredProcedure can be found in the section Section 20.2.5.6, “Accessing Stored Procedures with Connector/NET”.

Commands can have a timeout associated with them. This is useful as you may not want a situation were a command takes up an excessive amount of time. A timeout can be set using the CommandTimeout property. The following code snippet sets a timeout of one minute:

MySqlCommand cmd = new MySqlCommand();
cmd.CommandTimeout = 60;

The default value is 30 secs. A value of 0 indicates an indefinite wait and should be avoided. Note the default command timeout can be changed using the connection string option Default Command Timeout.

Prior to MySQL Connector/NET 6.2, MySqlCommand.CommandTimeout included user processing time, that is processing time not related to direct use of the connector. Timeout was implemented through a .NET Timer, that triggered after CommandTimeout seconds. This timer consumed a thread.

MySQL Connector/NET 6.2 introduced timeouts that are aligned with how Microsoft handles SqlCommand.CommandTimeout. This property is the cumulative timeout for all network reads and writes during command execution or processing of the results. A timeout can still occur in the MySqlReader.Read method after the first row is returned, and does not include user processing time, only IO operations. The 6.2 implementation uses the underlying stream timeout facility, so is more efficient in that it does not require the additional timer thread as was the case with the previous implementation.

Further details on this can be found in the relevant Microsoft documentation.