Developing INFORMATION_SCHEMA Plugins

In this talk I will walk through how to create dynamic INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins, using the new functionality within MySQL 5.1.

I will start with a walk through of a very basic ‘HELLO WORLD’ INFORMATION_SCHEMA table first of all, showing a user the very bare minimum that is required to create a pluggable I_S table, in terms of the plugin interface, structs and functions, as well as how to fill the tables with custom rows.

I will then show some examples of making some more interesting plugins – such as including the SIGAR OS statistics gathering library (released under the GPL by Hyperic) to collect CPU, Memory, Disk, Network and OS Configuration data within I_S tables, and a general ‘df -h’ INFORMATION_SCHEMA table.

Finally I will show users how to compile the plugins stand alone, and how to load and unload them whilst MySQL is running.