Federated is a storage engine for the

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

relational database management system A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

that allows creation of a table that is a local representation of a foreign (remote) table. It uses the MySQL client library API as a data transport, treating remote tables as if they were located on the local server. Each Federated table that is defined there is one .frm (data definition file containing information such as the URL of the data source). The actual data can exist on a local or remote MySQL instance. To create a Federated table, one has to specify a URL in the "CONNECTION" string: create table t1 ( a int, b varchar(32)) ENGINE=FEDERATED CONNECTION='mysql://user@hostname/test/t1' The connection URL is in the format of: scheme://user:pass@host:port/schema/tablename Upon creation of a Federated table, the user must ensure that the remote data source does indeed exist or an error will be issued. The MySQL Federated Storage Engine was authored by Patrick Galbraith and

Brian Aker Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972 in Lexington, Kentucky, US, is an open-source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Aker was Director of Architecture at MySQL AB ...

and is currently being maintained by Patrick Galbraith and Antony Curtis. It was introduced in 2005 with MySQL 5.0.

External links

MySQL Documentation on Federated Storage Engine
Database engines MySQL {{database-software-stub