MySqlConnection.Open Freezes with Amazon Aurora

When using Amazon Aurora RDS, you may experience a hang when calling MySqlConnection.Open(). The immediate prior log statement will be:

[TRACE]  ServerSession  Session0.0 ServerVersion=5.7.12 supports reset connection and pipelining; sending pipelined reset connection request

The cause of this problem is Amazon Aurora not correctly supporting pipelining in the MySQL protocol. This is known to be a problem with 2.x versions of Aurora (that implement MySQL 5.7), but not with 3.x versions (that implement MySQL 8.0).

To work around it, add Pipelining = False; to your connection string to disable the pipelining feature.