I understand that .NET 4.5 comes with a bunch of features to make asynchronous database operations easier to implement. MSDN says that if the connection string is not set to
The asynchronous methods for all drivers are defined in DbDataReader, eg DbDataReader.ReadAsync. It is up to the specific drivers to override these methods with specific implementations to take advantage of the asynchronous characteristics of each database and use eg. a naturally asynchronous operation instead of a synchronous operation wrapped in a thread.
That said, MySQL Connector/Net 6.8 adds support for asynchronous operations in Entity Framework 6 but the MySqlDataReader class does NOT provide a ReadAsync
method. This is because Connector uses an old architecture (pre-2.0), implementing the IDataReader interface instead of deriving from the generic DbDataReader class introduced in .NET 2.0.