Understanding MySQL Internals: Client/Server Communication

This paper discusses the details of the client/server communication in MySQL. The goal is to give the user the ability to look at a binary dump of the client/ server communication and be able to understand what happened. This paper can also be helpful if the user is trying to write a MySQL proxy server, a security application to audit MySQL traffic on the network, or some other program that for some reason needs to understand the low-level details of the MySQL client/server protocol.