Q. What is the FederatedX pluggable storage engine?

A. It is a fork of the Federated Storage Engine that Brian Aker and I
(Patrick Galbraith) developed originally . It is a storage engine that
uses a client connection to a remote MySQL data source as its data
source instead of a local file on disk.

Q. Why did you fork from Federated?

A. To enhance the storage engine independently of the
MySQL Server release schedule. Many people have been 
mentioning their dissatisfaction with the limitations
of Federated. I think the engine is a great concept and 
have a sense of obligation to continue to improve it.
There are some patches already that are in dire need
of being applied and tested.

Q. What do you plan to do with FederatedX?

A. Many things need addressing:

- Outstanding bugs
- How do deal with huge result sets
- Pushdown conditions (being able to pass things like LIMIT
  to the remote connection to keep from returning huge
  result sets).
- Better transactional support
- Other connection mechanisms (ODBC, JDBC, native drivers
  of other RDBMSs)

Q. What FederatedX is and is not?

A. FederatedX is not yet a complete "federated" solution in 
   the sense that other venders have developed (IBM, etc). It
   is essentially a networked storage engine. It is my hope
   to make it a real federated solution.

Q. In which MySQL distributions/forks/branches can I find FederateX

A. MariaDB (http://www.mariadb.com)