Extending MySQL

If MySQL can’t do what you need, one possibility is to extend its capabilities. If you’re interested in exploring any of these avenues further, there are good resources online, and there are books available on many of the topics. When we say “MySQL can’t do what you need,” we mean two things: MySQL can’t do it at all, or MySQL can do it, but in a slow or awkward way that’s not good enough. Either is a reason to look at extending MySQL. The good news is that MySQL is becoming more and more modular and general-purpose. For example, MySQL 5.1 has a lot of useful plug-in functionality; it even allows storage engines to be plug-ins, so you don’t need to compile them into the server.

Storage engines are a great way to extend MySQL for a special purpose. Brian Aker has written a skeleton storage engine and a series of articles and presentations about how to get started writing your own storage engine. This has formed the basis for several of the major third-party storage engines. Many companies are writing their own internal storage engines now, as you’ll see if you follow the MySQL internals mailing list. For example, Friendster uses a special storage engine for social graph operations, and we know of another company that built a custom engine for fuzzy searches. A simple custom storage engine isn’t very hard to write. You can also use a storage engine as an interface to another piece of software. A good example of this is the Sphinx storage engine, which interfaces with the Sphinx fulltext search software.

MySQL 5.1 also allows full-text search parser plug-ins, and you can write UDFs, which are great for CPU-intensive tasks that have to run in the server’s thread context and are too slow or clumsy in SQL. You can use them for administration, service integration, reading operating system information, calling web services, synchronizing data, and much more.

MySQL Proxy is another option that’s great if you want to add your own functionality to the MySQL protocol. And Paul McCullagh’s scalable blob-streaming infrastructure project (http://www.blobstreaming.org) opens up a range of new possibilities for storing large objects in MySQL.

Because MySQL is free, open source software, you can even hack the server itself if it doesn’t do what you need. We know of companies that have extended the server’s parser grammar, for example. Third parties have submitted many interesting MySQL extensions in the areas of performance profiling, scalability, and new features in recent years. The MySQL developers are very responsive and helpful when people want to extend MySQL. They’re available via the mailing list internals@lists.mysql.com (see http://lists.mysql.com to subscribe), MySQL forums, or the #mysql-dev IRC channel on freenode.

Source of Information : OReIlly High Performance MySQL Second Edition

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