The INFORMATION_SCHEMA is implemented as a standard set of plugins that use the FunctionEngine. The FunctionEngine is a Drizzle Storage Engine plugin that allows table function plugins to iterate over internal data structures and present them to the user as normal SQL data. For all normal queries that either scan or do lookups on INFORMATION_SCHEMA, no tempory table is created; the data structures internal to Drizzle are iterated through and returned row by row to the user. The only exception is when the rnd_pos access method is used, then a copy of the table is made in memory so that we will not have to continually perform full table scans.
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All of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables are read-only.