MySQL 5 View + VB Users Table

[inxil]

Moved from http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=250284 as suggested by vB team.

So let me just say first that I'm running VB 3.5.2 so if pluggable authentication has been added since that version, sorry for this post. Essentially I need to have VB authenticate against an existing users database. Currently, I'm using plugins to sync the data each time someone logs in, but that's not an ideal strategy. I'm upgrading VB and my server, and was thinking about moving to MySQL 5. One interesting thing about MySQL 5 is that it now supports views. So I was thinking about creating a special vb_user_addl table that holds all the VB-specific data, and then creating a VIEW that joins the data from my users table with the data from the vb_user_addl table (and makes all necessary changes to the column names).

Now while I'm pretty sure I could make this work, I'm not sure about the performance issues. Has anyone tried this? Any tips? Any thoughts on a better solution?

Thanks!