User Defined Functions (UDFs) have been a part of MySQL for many years, but the introduction of SQL stored procedures and triggers creates many new applications for UDFs in MySQL 5.0. This presentation will explore some of the possibilities, with a focus on how UDFs allow MySQL to interoperate with other open source projects.

MySQL AB's John David Duncan will demonstrate using UDFs along with triggers to expire records from Memcached (www.danga.com/memcached/). He will present a set of UDFs and stored procedures that provide a messaging service between database servers, built using the Spread Toolkit (www.spread.org), and analagous to the "Service Broker" feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. And he will discuss the role that UDFs and dynamic plugins will play in the evolving architecture of the MySQL server.