If you are creating a number of FEDERATED tables on the same server, or if you want to simplify the process of creating FEDERATED tables, you can use the CREATE SERVER statement to define the server connection parameters, just as you would with the CONNECTION string.

The format of the CREATE SERVER statement is:

CREATE SERVER
server_name
FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER wrapper_name
OPTIONS (option [, option] ...)

The server_name is used in the connection string when creating a new FEDERATED table.

For example, to create a server connection identical to the CONNECTION string:

CONNECTION='mysql://fed_user@remote_host:9306/federated/test_table';

You would use the following statement:

CREATE SERVER fedlink
FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER mysql
OPTIONS (USER 'fed_user', HOST 'remote_host', PORT 9306, DATABASE 'federated');

To create a FEDERATED table that uses this connection, you still use the CONNECTION keyword, but specify the name you used in the CREATE SERVER statement.

CREATE TABLE test_table (
    id     INT(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    name   VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    other  INT(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
    PRIMARY KEY  (id),
    INDEX name (name),
    INDEX other_key (other)
)
ENGINE=FEDERATED
DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
CONNECTION='fedlink/test_table';

The connection name in this example contains the name of the connection (fedlink) and the name of the table (test_table) to link to, separated by a slash. If you specify only the connection name without a table name, the table name of the local table is used instead.

For more information on CREATE SERVER, see Section 12.1.9, “CREATE SERVER Syntax”.

The CREATE SERVER statement accepts the same arguments as the CONNECTION string. The CREATE SERVER statement updates the rows in the mysql.servers table. See the following table for information on the correspondence between parameters in a connection string, options in the CREATE SERVER statement, and the columns in the mysql.servers table. For reference, the format of the CONNECTION string is as follows:

scheme://user_name[:password]@host_name[:port_num]/db_name/tbl_name