Ever wanted to use your server's OS for authenticating MySQL users ? Or the corporate LDAP repository ?Unfortunately options like the above are plentiful nowadays. And providing hard-coded support for protocol X or service Y is not the best possible idea.
MySQL 5.5 has taken the step into the right direction by providing an infrastructure allowing one to make the server understand different authentication protocols by creating a set of simple plugins (one for the client and one for the server).So now you can easily extend MySQL to search for and authenticate users in your favorite user directory.In fact the API supplied is so versatile that we took the possibility to re-design the current "native" authentication mechanism into a built-in always-on plugin !
OK, let me give you an example:
Imagine we have a bunch of users defined in your OS, e.g. we have a user joro with his respective password. And we have a MySQL …