John David Duncan is talking about UDFs in MySQL 5 (or SQL as a Glue Language) at the MySQL Users Conference. I just realized that this is JD.
Why do we like MySQL? Because it's open source fast, reliable, and easy to use. This has been true since the early days of MySQL.
For many years MySQL did not have stored procedures which can make client/server apps more efficient. MySQL made up for this with lots of internal functions and UDFs.
In SQL standard (SQL92) there are 7 defined string functions. Oracle 8i had 11 string functions. MySQL 4 had 40+ string functions.
JD looks at PHP, Perl and MySQL and how they all are a part of a stack.
User-Defined Functions are fairly simple C programs loaded into the server at runtime. In MySQL you do CREATE FUNCTION metaphon RETURNS STRING SONAME "udf_example.so".
In MySQL 5 there are triggers, …
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