Writing an SQL Parser and Optimizer

I'm taking a database implementation course, and my professor has flipped his lid this semester and assigned one of the labs to be an SQL parser and optimizer (using equivalence rules, etc.). Given an SQL statement and a database schema (with some statistical metadata on the contents), I am to par

VC++ and mysqlclient

onnect to a MySQL database, does a query, and exits? Thanks in advance for any direction you can give me. If I don't find a solution in the next week, I'm just going to have to drop MySQL and use something else. Mike ----------