20.1 MySQL C API

The C API code is distributed with MySQL. It is included in the mysqlclient library and allows C programs to access a database.

Many of the clients in the MySQL source distribution are written in C. If you are looking for examples that demonstrate how to use the C API, take a look at these clients.

Most of the other client APIs (all except Java) use the mysqlclient library to communicate with the MySQL server. This means that, for example, you can take advantage of many of the same environment variables that are used by other client programs, because they are referenced from the library. See 12.1 Overview of the different MySQL programs, for a list of these variables.

The client has a maximum communication buffer size. The size of the buffer that is allocated initially (16K bytes) is automatically increased up to the maximum size (the default maximum is 24M). Since buffer sizes are increased only as demand warrants, simply increasing the default maximum limit does not in inself cause more resources to be used. This size check is mostly a check for erroneous queries and communication packets.

The communication buffer must be large enough to contain a single SQL statement (for client-to-server traffic) and one row of returned data (for server-to-client traffic). Each thread's communication buffer is dynamically enlarged to handle any query or row up to the maximum limit. For example, if you have BLOB values that contain up to 16M of data, you must have a communication buffer limit of at least 16M (in both server and client). The client's default maximum is 24M, but the default maximum in the server is 1M. You can increase this by changing the value of the max_allowed_packet parameter when the server is started. 10.1 Tuning server parameters.

The MySQL server shrinks each communication buffer to net_buffer_length bytes after each query. For clients, the size of the buffer associated with a connection is not decreased until the connection is closed, at which time client memory is reclaimed.

If you are programming with threads, you should compile the MySQL C API with --with-thread-safe-client. This will make the C API thread safe per connection. You can let two threads share the same connection as long if you do the following:

Two threads can't send a query to the MySQL at the same time on the same connection. In particular you have to ensure that between a mysql_query() and mysql_store_result() no other thread is using the same connection.

Many threads can access different result sets that are retrieved with mysql_store_result().

If you use mysql_use_result, you have to ensure that no other thread is asking anything on the same connection until the result set is closed.