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

A Boolean full-text parser


We know the Boolean syntax of the MySQL built-in full-text parser. MySQL already supports it; there is no fun in reimplementing the same thing. To do something new we could make a parser that supports AND, OR, and NOT keywords, which is supposedly a more user-friendly syntax and our users may like it more than MySQL plus and minus prefixes.

How could our parser support such a syntax? It could, for example, by doing look-ahead, reading the next word before sending the current one to MySQL. If the next word is AND, the current one must have yesno=1. The idea is simple, but the devil, as always, is in the detail:

  • Both words before and after AND must have yesno=1.

  • To support foo AND NOT bar we may need to look two words ahead.

  • Typically, both words around OR must have yesno=0. But not if an AND is involved. In foo OR bar AND bla the second word must have yesno=1.

  • In a query string such as foo AND bar OR some AND thing we cannot simply have yesno=1 in all four words....