Using PHP as a MySQL Storage Engine

Johannes Schlüter, a member of the MySQL Connectors and Client Connectivity team, has suggested a novel use for PHP: a storage engine for MySQL!

In his blog post, he discusses how the plugin API in MySQL 5.1 makes it easy to write new storage engines, and he illustrates by implementing some of the plugin interfaces using PHP functions. A PHP array is used to store table data, with iterators and array functions being used to read and write records. Worth reading, both to gain a better understanding of MySQL’s plugin API, and as an example of some ingenious thinking!