Adding frm parser util in MariaDB

MariaDB, one of the most popular databases in the world and used across many organizations. It has lot of features from MySQL since its a fork of it. You can switch storage engines according to your usecase, it has very good support for replication. DBAs around the world rely on it for their day to day operations. But they face an issue when they want to extract out table specifications from existing table files present on server.

MariaDB/MySQL stores information of Table schema in a format called frm . Whenever it creates a new table it creates these files.

I will take audience through my journey around this file format and how I went around and added a new frm parser util tool, which can be used separately from the server.

I will talk about challenges that I faced when I had to reuse the existing frm parsing logic present in MariaDB and how I overcame that.

I will also touch open the process of contributing to MariaDB and their style and format for commit and PRs.

Audience will learn from about frm file format. How MariaDB loads/creates tables when we execute a DDL command. I also expect them to takeaway learning on how to create a util around a Database as complex and large as MariaDB