Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine

Did you ever try to find the few missing rows in a table holding an extremely large time series? Or did you have to fight with somebody else’s weird database design—storing data in columns that should have been rows, or even multiple values per field? Ever wanted to use a prepared query for a variable-sized IN-predicate?

Some common problems like these are solved easily and efficiently using an auxiliary table containing nothing but a sequence. This session will show you how, with hands-on examples—but instead of manually filling our sequence tables and wasting disk storage (or RAM) and I/O resources, we’ll use the SeqEngine: A pluggable storage engine for MySQL 5.1 that creates our customized sequences on the fly.

The session mostly concentrates on the SQL-side to the problems. But as this tiny engine also serves well as a nice example of how to make use of MySQL’s pluggable storage engine API, there will be an associated BOF: We’ll be able to have a closer look behind the scenes there.