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

Chapter 10. TOCAB Storage Engine — Implementing Indexes

In this chapter, we will implement the most complex plugin of the book. Indexes are crucial for the performance of the storage engine and a big part of Storage Engine API deals with indexes, different types of indexes, various ways of using them, and numerous index-related optimizations. We will inevitably have to cut corners to keep the size of this chapter in bounds. Although the plugin that we will develop here will be a fully working storage engine, it will be by no means feature complete. At the end of the chapter, we will discuss what this engine is missing and what features it could get to become a usable general purpose storage engine.

B-tree library

There are many different data structures that can be used as "indexes". Most popular are those of the B-tree family and hash tables. However, discussing details of different B-tree or hash table implementations is beyond the scope of this book. For our purposes, we will simply take...