Comments on: Thoughts on using MySQL plugins

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:08:35 +0000

“MySQL plugins are a tricky business. To create a plugin, you must compile it against the MySQL version you wish the users to use it with.”

It actually depends on what the plugin is using. If it only makes use of the plugin API, a single binary should work fine across a given major version. Problem is that larger (and more useful) plugins usually rely on server internals, which can change at any given version.

By: Medbob

Medbob — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:50:42 +0000

Not being familiar with the coding of plugins, is there a reason why there are not interfaces or standard APIs that can be exposed to a plugin to allow it to be upwardly compatible rather than combined at the compiler hip? This has been an issue for a long time, and it seems like a compatibility API layer is needed.

By: Henrik Ingo

Henrik Ingo — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:31:21 +0000

This is one of the major benefits of MariaDB. Unfortunately until now they didn’t have anything for MySQL 5.5, so you were out of luck anyway, but the idea of including as much stuff as possible into the same installation is certainly great.

By: Jan Steinman

Jan Steinman — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:29:46 +0000

I’m reminded of the EXTENSIVE MediaWiki plugin library. They aren’t necessarily maintained, but meta-info tells you which was the last version they were known to work with, which lets you be a better chooser. Also, if it’s important enough to you, you can patch to a new version and post your changes for others.

On the other hand, it suffers from “branchitis.” I made extensive enhancements to a MySQL plugin, and someone else LATER made extensive enhancements and ignored mine — now we have “version wars…”

By: Sheeri Cabral

Sheeri Cabral — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:47:32 +0000

This is something that is done very well in other projects. Apache and Perl come to mind – they have different packages….so a repo like MariaDB has is useful.