I searched myself and found the thread, where listed drivers they used and worked vs not worked:
Hello All, In reviewing a prior thread (https://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1829136), it seems as though I have a very similar dilemma. The primary difference is that I'd prefer not to utilize outdated ODBC connectors due to vulnerability concerns. I'll quickly recap below: MySQL...
www.tek-tips.com
You'll see I had questions about the specific construct of server and client, but that turned out to be okay, a Windows client using MySQL Connector/ODBC 8.0.33 works, using with a connection string with the Driver part "Driver={MySQL ODBC 8.0 ANSI Driver}"
A side topic there was Excel working with newer drivers, still, so the suspicion was it's not the drivers fault but VFP. And indeed that later drivers don't work with VFP has to do with VFPs ODBC layer, but the difference between (modern) Excel and VFP is Unicode vs ANSI more than anything else, and secondary the version of ODBC itself supported, ODBC in general not specific to any database.
So one way out to use more modern drivers, too, is to have an intermediate layer programmed in .NET, for example, and also using other drivers, like MariaDB drivers. I also talked about picking MariaDB as a server instead of MySQL, which even makes more sense, but I also think - not backed by experiments, but by compatibility intent of MariaDB development - that a more modern MariaDB driver could be used to access a MySQL server, not only a MariaDB server. Besides the 8.0.33 driver we're stuck with - as it seems - idoes not stop working with more recent Server versions.
From the other world of MSSQL I also know by experience that old MSSQL legacy ODBC drivers allwed me to use more modern MSSQL Server features, new T-SQL functions, for example. Becuase the ODBC driver is just a messanger between a client and the database engine on the server side. Only the VFP ODBC drivers you need to access VFP DBFs act as the server themselve and are not only a messnager, because there is no VFP server running queries. So in case of accessing any server database the only importance is whether the communication between VFPs client ODBC layer and the driver works and the communication between the ODBC driver and the remote database engine also works. Which means an overall later end of life.
If your major usage of VFP is as a client to database backends you're already clearly in the days of VFP needing legacy drivers the VFP ODBC layer can commnuicate with that are also capable to communicate with the more modernn SQL engines of the remote databases. I'm sure the next way out we'll need to use is putting the VFP ODBC layer to the rest and instead use other interop capabilities of VFP via OLE/COM or DECLARE DLL to use the ODBC layers of other runtimes, like that of C++ or .NET languages.