I can highly recommend OTL.
Not only does it support all major DBs, it's also very STL-ish and is generally written according to to proper C++ methodology (IMO). It worked for me just fine on VC8 (I used the MySQL ODBC connector).
Moreover, it's a one-header library. So there's no linkage issues or anything. Just include the header and you're done. You're 3 lines of code away from querying a MySQL table.
I've used it over the past few months, and also had a good experience communicating with its developer, asking questions, etc.
