Practical MySQL Plugin Development

In this 3 hour tutorial, attendees will learn how to write plugins for the MySQL server.

The tutorial will have a strong focus on practical, hands-on development. The speakers will give live coding demonstrations and attendees are invited to raise questions at any time.

Basic C/C++ skills are recommended for attendees, although not required, in which case some programming skills in Java or PHP are hightly recommended. To allow attendees with no prior C/C++ skills to still gain knowledge and skills, a particular approach is taken that proved to be successful in last year’s UDF tutorial.

Attendees will be provided with a handout containing detailed, well-written labs and instructions to execute them. Accompanying scripts and code will be prepared and distributed at the start of the tutorial, allowing all attendees to build, deploy and test plugins and change the code to learn more about plugin implementation. Instructions and scripts will be prepared for Microsoft Windows (where applicable), GNU/Linux and Mac OSX.

Here is a high level outline of the topics that will be covered during the tutorial:

1. Overview of the MySQL plugin API
• Architecture
• Components (important functions and structures, versioning, s ervices)
• Plugin deployment, configuration and administration
• the plugin.h header file

1. Setting up a build environment
• compiling and linking plug-ins with gcc

1. Getting started: Daemon plug-in
• Daemon plug-in specific interface
• Practical example: a heartbeat plugin

1. FULLTEXT parser plug-in development
• FULLTEXT plug-in specific interface
• create a parser front end to filter out indexable content in complex documents for example XML files
• create a custom FULLTEXT parser for a particular non-english language

1. INFORMATION_SCHEMA plug-in development
• Information schema plug in specific interface
• Learn how to report server internals such as the contents of the query cache in a custom information_schema table
• Create an information_schema plug-in to query data at the operating system level, such as the process list and the list of OS users

1. Storage Engine plug-in
• Storage engine plug-in specific interface
• Create an engine that emulates an Oracle sequence
• Create an engine to read and write an arbitrary text file in a fixed or separated format

1. A look at MySQL 6.0 plugins:
• Interface changes, new features
• New plugin type: Audit plugin
• Practical example