One embodiment of the present invention provides a system stored on a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium for invoking a plug-in that is dynamically associated with a database operation. During operation, a client sends a request to a database system to perform an operation on the database, wherein the request includes a control-message which specifies a plug-in which needs to be executed. Next, the system executes the plug-in at a plug-in server to obtain a plug-in result. Then, the system determines if the plug-in result is an error identifier. If so, the system sends the error identifier to the client. On the other hand, if the plug-in result is not an error identifier, the system performs the operation to obtain an operation result. The system then sends the operation result to the client.