Writing Plugins for MariaDB

About

Generally speaking, writing plugins for MariaDB is very similar to writing plugins for MySQL.

Authentication Plugins

See Pluggable Authentication.

Storage Engine Plugins

Storage Engines can extend CREATE TABLE syntax with optional index, field, and table attribute clauses. See Extending CREATE TABLE for more information.

Plugin Declaration Structure

In MariaDB 5.2 we introduced a new MariaDB plugin declaration. It differs from the MySQL plugin declaration in the following ways:

1. it has no useless 'reserved' field (the very last field in the MySQL plugin declaration)
2. it has a 'maturity' declaration
3. it has a field for a text representation of the version field

MariaDB can load plugins that only have the MySQL plugin declaration but both maturity and the text version will show up as 'Unknown' in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PLUGINS table.

For compiled-in (not dynamically loaded) plugins, the presence of the MariaDB plugin declaration is mandatory.

Example Plugin Declaration

The MariaDB plugin declaration looks like this:

/* MariaDB plugin declaration */
maria_declare_plugin(example)
{
   MYSQL_STORAGE_ENGINE_PLUGIN, /* the plugin type (see include/mysql/plugin.h) */
   &example_storage_engine_info, /* pointer to type-specific plugin descriptor   */
   "EXAMPLEDB", /* plugin name */
   "John Smith",  /* plugin author */
   "Example of plugin interface", /* the plugin description */
   PLUGIN_LICENSE_GPL, /* the plugin license (see include/mysql/plugin.h) */
   example_init_func,   /* Pointer to plugin initialization function */
   example_deinit_func,  /* Pointer to plugin deinitialization function */
   0x0001 /* Numeric version 0xAABB means AA.BB version */,
   example_status_variables,  /* Status variables */
   example_system_variables,  /* System variables */
   "0.1 example",  /* String version representation */
   MariaDB_PLUGIN_MATURITY_EXPERIMENTAL /* Maturity (see include/mysql/plugin.h)*/
}
maria_declare_plugin_end;