How to do it...

How it works...

The SHOW STATUS output gives us two different sets of information in this recipe. Firstly, the actual presence of the Cassandra% variables tells us that the Cassandra storage engine is installed. Secondly, it shows us some useful information about our usage of the Cassandra storage engine since it was installed (or the server was last restarted) and if there have been any exceptions. Since we just installed the plugin, all the values will likely be zeroes unless we have an active application that used the plugin between the time when we ran the INSTALL and SHOW STATUS commands.

There's more...

In the recipe, we modified the full SHOW STATUS output to restrict it just to the information on the Cassandra storage engine by adding LIKE 'Cassandra%' to the end of the command. We could also just add the following line of command to get the complete output:

SHOW STATUS;

There is a lot of output, so it is often better to use LIKE and some text with the wildcard character (%) to shorten the output to just what we want to know.

Many plugins and storage engines in MariaDB provide the STATUS variables that are useful when we want to know how the engine or plugin is operating. However, not all do; the preferred method to check whether a given plugin or storage engine is installed is to use the SHOW PLUGINS; command.

See also