No this post is not about Sun buying mySql.

So I compiled a fresh 5.0.51 on two boxes. It’s quite easy to setup, all it takes is the main server and the sub servers to support federated engine.Only trick is to remove fulltext indexes on the federated tables. Leave the main server as-is. On the sub server, create the table with ENGINE=Federated and set the connection to the main server. Make sure you have the user created on tha main server and the password of the user does not contain any special characters. (some reported @ $ characters are problematic).

It works on the first try. Great feature! However, setup is a bit long if you want to federate a whole database with 100 tables in it.

Then you try your first query on a mid sized table with 250K rows.

SELECT * FROM table_t LIMIT 10;
Runs 0.03 sec on main server, takes 8 seconds on the federated server!

then the second:

SELECT count(id) FROM table_t
Runs 0.02 sec on main server, takes 252 seconds on the federated server!

Looks like I’m not the only one complainig about the problem so I didn’t care to fill in a bug report.

More info about federation is here if you are still interested in.

Update:
Giuseppe Maxia contacted me refering his article on federation engine. It’s good read.

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