Is anyone else as pleased as I am about the Federated storage engine available in Mysql 5.x ? If you haven't see it already then check out the link:

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/...d-storage.html

The real power will come once other data sources (oracle, sqlserver, db2) become available and we can query multiple datasources from a single mysql connection in our perl/php scripts.

Does anybody know when any of these other "connectors" might become available?

I don't know. Maybe with the new plug-and-play architecture someone figures it out But it will be, indeed, a very powerful tool!