AdvancedUDFsInMySQL
Notes by Mike Kruckenberg
John David Duncan is talking about UDFs in MySQL 5 (or SQL as a Glue Language) at the MySQL Users Conference. I just realized that this is JD.
Why do we like MySQL? Because it's open source fast, reliable, and easy to use. This has been true since the early days of MySQL.
For many years MySQL did not have stored procedures which can make client/server apps more efficient. MySQL made up for this with lots of internal functions and UDFs.
In SQL standard (SQL92) there are 7 defined string functions. Oracle 8i had 11 string functions. MySQL 4 had 40+ string functions.
JD looks at PHP, Perl and MySQL and how they all are a part of a stack.
User-Defined Functions are fairly simple C programs loaded into the server at runtime. In MySQL you do CREATE FUNCTION metaphon RETURNS STRING SONAME "udf_example.so".
In MySQL 5 there are triggers, stored procedures but no debugger. MyProcDbg. Anders Karlsson created a UDF that serves as a debugger. There's also a memcache UDF that ties MySQL into the memcache technology that comes from livejournal. The last example is a UDF that JD created for asynchronous messaging. Pretty interesting idea.
JD then goes into information on the pluggable parser for fulltext parsing. In the future there are hopes to have additional plugins including things like authentication.