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

What's left


Not much. The obligatory info() method—although we cannot do much here, we do not even know the number of rows in the table. Let's just return something—MySQL will not take this value too seriously, because we do not have the HA_STATS_RECORDS_IS_EXACT flag in table_flags():

int ha_html::info(uint flag)
{
if (flag & HA_STATUS_VARIABLE)
stats.records = 10;
return 0;
}

Then, there is the external_lock() method. It is an important method—with a few exceptions MySQL calls it at the beginning and at the end of every statement. The name is historical, MyISAM and pre-MyISAM engines stored tables in files—just like our engine does—but used file locking to prevent multiple processes from modifying the same table file in parallel. The method "external lock" was designed to allow the engine to take this (external for MySQL) lock, after MySQL has taken its own "internal" table lock. The second argument of external_lock() is either F_UNLCK (at the end of the statement) or F_RDLCK...