I was asked this question recently, and I thought it was a great little tidbit of knowledge to pass along. The short answer is "no". The slightly longer answer was written up by Jan Kneschke when dealing with a forum post about proxy + connection pooling.From http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?146,169265,169700The clear-text password is _never_ transfered in the authentication phase.On the network we have:

The answers to the last pop quiz are up: http://www.pythian.com/blogs/868/pop-quiz-mysql-clusterSo here's another pop quiz. Given the following:Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \\g.Your MySQL connection id is 16450949 to server version: 4.1.14-standard-logType 'help;' or '\\h' for help. Type '\\c' to clear the buffer.mysql> select count(*),length(password) from mysql.user group by l

Lenz Grimmer recently wrote two blogs about password security on MySQL. Both are worth reading in detail. You'll find them in Basic MySQL Security: Providing passwords on the command line and More on MySQL password security. Although I wrote a comment on the latter one, there is one point I thought was worth its own blog.