Before a storage engine can be used, the storage engine plugin shared library must be loaded into MySQL using the INSTALL PLUGIN statement. For example, if the EXAMPLE engine plugin is named ha_example and the shared library is named ha_example.so, you load it with the following statement:

INSTALL PLUGIN ha_example SONAME 'ha_example.so';

The shared library must be located in the MySQL server plugin directory, the location of which is given by the plugin_dir system variable.