Since MariaDB's over the wire protocol is backward compatible with MySQL, it is part of our first-class support set. And Maria (but not My) has a hidden treasure we can exploit: the CONNECT storage engine. This is basically an engine for talking to sources of data other than classical base tables, such as are supported by MyISAM, Aria, InnoDB, etc. Here are the sources it currently supports and rectangularizes:

Fixed-length binary records

CSV and friends

dBase III/IV files (FoxBase etc.)

Flat text files

Filesystem directories (either hierarchical or non-hierarchical view)

INI files

JDBC

JSON files (if the data is reasonably rectangular)

MongoDB

ODBC (including unixODBC)

Column-oriented binary with one file per column (alpha)

XML (if the data is reasonably rectangular)

HTML tables

Zipfile directories

In some cases you have to use a CREATE TABLE to specify the rectangularization, in other cases not. Some are updatable directly; others are updatable but destroy the original (updating XML gives something matching the rectangular view, not the original more complex view), yet others are read-only. See <https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/connect-table-types-overview/> for links to more detailed docs.

There are also engines outside CONNECT that provide similar abilities: Cassandra, MyRocks, Object Query Graph. See <https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/storage-engines/> for links.

John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan xxxxxx@ccil.org
One time I called in to the central system and started working on a big
thick 'sed' and 'awk' heavy duty data bashing script. One of the geologists
came by, looked over my shoulder and said 'Oh, that happens to me too.
Try hanging up and phoning in again.' --Beverly Erlebacher