External Language Stored Procedures

Yay! It's the weekend!

Why does the weekend make me cheerful? I get time to spend on personal projects, although my sweet wife does complain that my 'personal projects' don't look much different than my day job.

This project, I have been doodling with for quite a while. It spawned from a little project that Eric Herman and myself started to look at 2 years ago with what we called "MySQL UDF v2". At the time, it included a whole plug-in and unit testing framework. Since we have to work with what is in the server, we dropped our plug-in and unit test framework after the current MySQL 5.1 plug-in system suddenly appeared: Somehow, I ended up maintaining it but that's another story.

A more modern and sane system for user-defined functions is still our goal. One part of our concept is to minimize the amount of 'heavy lifting' that needs to be done in C in order to create a new language plug-in. Eric being the happy Java guy that he is, is working on the Java stuff and for some crazy reason I have decided to take on Perl as an interesting challenge.

Alas, we never get much solid time to work on this project - The bulk of the effort is done during MySQL developer conferences, the most recent was the Heidelberg conference which finished only a few days ago. Heidelberg was significant because Eric and I successfully demonstrated Java UDFs working with a SQL standards compliant CREATE declaration and the Java function demonstrated was a simple string reverse method, although it is capable of much more.

We have every plan to continue working on this project - it is fun, especially now that we can demonstrate it. I have thrown together a cron job which will make a snapshot of our work repository and publish it on my personal website.

Words of encouragement or even code are all greatly appreciated.