In this post, I am going to start a small series of articles which divided into four different parts.

In this set of articles, I will provide basic theory and practical to perform cross-platform or cross-server queries in MySQL. We can also say remote queries.

Some of the Database Professional already aware about Linked server object of Microsoft SQL Server, which is used for cross-server queries.
Many times, we need to SELECT data from the different database server and even, we require to fetch data from various RDBMS products as well.

MySQL also provides the FEDERATED Storage Engine to access data from a remote MySQL Database Server.

The FEDERATED Storage Engine is available beginning with MySQL 5.0.3.

We don’t require to write any database level trigger to update real-time data into the local FEDERATED table because it is fetching data remotely and even does not need to store that data physically on the hard disk.

We can query to the local FEDERATED table like any other normal table, but it is working as a virtual table only.

The FEDERATED storage engine is not enabled by default in the running server.
You can visit the next article to configure and enable FEDERATED Engine.