So what does someone go off and do?
Create exactly that.
http://code.google.com/p/mysql-filesystem-engine/
The engine was written by Google's Chip Turner and can process any file that the database has access too (though exactly how the parsing works I am unsure about, I've only read the code related to the actual engine). The example given is this:
mysql> CREATE TABLE LoadAverage (
load1 DECIMAL(3, 2),
load5 DECIMAL(3, 2),
load15 DECIMAL(3, 2),
active_processes VARCHAR(12),
lastpid INTEGER) ENGINE=FILESYSTEM connection="file:///proc/loadavg";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from LoadAverage;
+-------+-------+--------+--------------
| load1 | load5 | load15 | active_processes | lastpid |
+-------+-------+--------+--------------
| 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 1/97 | 6061 |
+-------+-------+--------+--------------
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
