available. I developed the Federated Storage Engine when I worked at MySQL,
and really saw a lot of potential with it. However, there were many other
projects that I had to give attention to, and many features and bug fixes that
users wanted didn't come into fruition because of the busy schedule. I left
MySQL a year ago to pursue an opportunity with Grazr what has kept me equally
busy. However, I have made a resolution this year to give some projects that I
have wanted to improve the attention that they need. I still see a lot of
potential with the "federated" concept.
Federated as it is isn't what many people expect it to be. IBM for instance,
has a federation as a very integral part of DB2. The Federated Storage Engine
is a proof-of-concept storage engine -- not to say it doesn't have
functionality that people can and are using currently.
I'd like to do what I can to change that. Some enhancements that I can think
of are:
- Push-down conditions - being able to have a LIMIT be pushed down
to a remote data source so a user isn't hammered with a huge data set. - Better transactional functionality. There is a patch out there that is
suffering bit-rot that I would like to get included. - Other connection protocols. I wrote the Federated ODBC Storage Engine (I
will release this soon too after I clean it up and test it. It would be good however to have a layer for other connections that doesn't require a separate storage engine. Also think JDBC, native client libs for other RDBMSs (think of the potential for migration tools!) - Handling large data sets - there must be a better way!.
Releasing this as a pluggable storage engine gives it independence from the
main server to facilitate faster improvement through more frequent bug fixes
and enhancements (patches, patches, and also patches!)
This release of FederatedX Pluggable Storage Engine is a fork of the Federated Storage Engine as it currently is, but that will change as it is modified.
About FederatedX (for those who haven't used Federated before)
FederatedX Plug-able Storage Engine is a storage engine for MySQL that allows you to create a table which uses a network connection to a remote database table as its data source, as opposed to most storage engines that use a table file or table-space file as a data source.
The source is available from:
http://hg.patg.net/federatedx-storage-engine/
tar.gz:
http://patg.net/federatedx_engine-0.1.tar.gz