Book Image

MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development

Book Image

MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development

Overview of this book

MySQL has introduced a Plugin API with its latest version – a robust, powerful, and easy way of extending the server functionality with loadable modules on the fly. But until now anyone wishing to develop a plugin would almost certainly need to dig into the MySQL source code and search the Web for missing bits of the information.This is the first book on the MySQL Plugin API. Written together with one of the Plugin API primary architects, it contains all the details you need to build a plugin. It shows what a plugin should contain and how to compile, install, and package it. Every chapter illustrates the material with thoroughly explained source code examples.Starting from the basic features, common to all plugin types, and the structure of the plugin framework, this book will guide you through the different plugin types, from simple examples to advanced ones. Server monitoring, full-text search in JPEG comments, typo-tolerant searches, getting the list of all user variables, system usage statistics, or a complete storage engine with indexes – these and other plugins are developed in different chapters of this book, demonstrating the power and versatility of the MySQL Plugin API and explaining the intricate details of MySQL Plugin programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Boolean parsers


The default, natural language, full-text search mode works well for inexperienced users who can simply describe what they want to find using plain English (or any other language) and let the system figure out, with complex statistical and probabilistic analysis, what rows are relevant to them. Other users want more control over what will be found. This is where Boolean search mode is used. It allows users to specify exactly which words must be present in all found rows and which words must not be present. It can search for "phrases"—sequences of words—for prefixes of words, and fine tune the importance of individual words for the result of a query. For Boolean search mode to work, the full-text parser needs to support it; it needs to be able to extract the Boolean search operators from a query and to convey this information to MySQL.

In our example from the previous chapter we ignored Boolean search mode and only sent the search words—not Boolean operators—from the query...