Book Image

MariaDb Essentials

Book Image

MariaDb Essentials

Overview of this book

This book will take you through all the nitty-gritty parts of MariaDB, right from the creation of your database all the way to using MariaDB’s advanced features. At the very beginning, we show you the basics, that is, how to install MariaDB. Then, we walk you through the databases and tables of MariaDB, and introduce SQL in MariaDB. You will learn about all the features that have been added in MariaDB but are absent in MySQL. Moving on, you’ll learn to import and export data, views, virtual columns, and dynamic columns in MariaDB. Then, you’ll get to grips with full-text searches and queries in MariaDb. You’ll also be familiarized with the CONNECT storage engine. At the end of the book, you’ll be introduced to the community of MariaDB.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
MariaDB Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Dynamic columns


Those who know languages similar to JavaScript can think of a dynamic column set as a dynamic object stored in the database in a binary format. Those who don't fully understand what a dynamic object is can think of dynamic column sets as column containers. At every moment it is possible to add or drop columns from these containers, as well as read them or get a list of columns. A dynamic column is a single attribute that can be created or manipulated in a set. This feature is a good way of storing non-homogeneous data in the same table.

Note

Dynamic columns were introduced in MariaDB 5.3, and were notably improved in MariaDB 10.0. This chapter only discusses the MariaDB 10.0 implementation.

Creating the dynamic columns container

A dynamic column needs to be stored in a binary column. This column can be of type TINYBLOB, BLOB, MEDIUMBLOB, or LONGBLOB. If the set can be empty, we will declare the column as NULL, because the NULL value is the only way to represent an empty dynamic...