Archive for the ‘Databases’ Category

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helping (save) mysql

Posted on 29/12/2009, 3:27 pm, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

The latest in the whole Save MySQL campaign: HelpMySQL.org. Monty has a really long blog post on how to help keep the Internet free. When you read that, scroll down towards “Q: How do the proposed remedies benefit your company, Monty Program Ab?” Understand that Monty is doing this for the love of the codebase and the project that is MySQL…

Totally love the copywriting here: Customers pay the bill: Oracle can have Sun but not MySQL. There’s been a lot of FUD in the last few months, but I suggest you read the issues (with an open mind), check out the FAQ, and if you’d like, sign the petition.

For me? Never again, will I recommend software for commercial use that doesn’t have a lively developer community. Sun reductions hitting open source efforts proves why – commercial (only/mostly) backed open source, just seems troublesome, when companies get merged/sold/et al.

OK, back to your regular scheduled programming. I shall enjoy my visit to a rather cold and wet London. Happy New Year!

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Harish Pillay and Brian Aker debate with Richard Stallman (Part 2)

Posted on 25/10/2009, 9:41 pm, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

The attendees were not satisfied with the first answer RMS gave to Brian, that Harish Pillay (Chief Technical Architect, Red Hat Singapore), chose to ask RMS what more he had to say, with regards to the letter he’d written. He answered quite candidly in this video, which Brian chimed in for as well.



The back channel for all this was Twitter… Don’t hesitate to follow @harishpillay, @brianaker, @piawaugh or even @webmink (Simon Phipps, while not at the event, was available on Twitter). Some interesting reading, naturally.

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Brian Aker debates with Richard Stallman

Posted on 25/10/2009, 3:41 am, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

At foss.my 2009, Brian Aker asked Richard Stallman at his keynote, about the Oracle/Sun acquisition (with a focus on MySQL), with regards to the parallel licensing approach used by MySQL. Brian was referring to:

As only the original rights holder can sell commercial licenses, no new forked version of the code will have the ability to practice the parallel licensing approach, and will not easily generate the resources to support continued development of the MySQL platform.

from Richard’s Letter to the EC opposing Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. Listen to the discussion between Brian and Richard.



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Flickr’s upgraded shard

Posted on 14/10/2009, 12:01 am, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

While going about my day, I stumbled upon John Allspaw’s tweet about his experience with MySQL 5.0.51 versus Percona’s 5.0.83 highperf Percona build. For those that don’t remember John from the MySQL Conference & Expo’s, he’s the guy managing operations at Flickr, and he recently even wrote a book about webops.

Click on the photo above, to see when the upgrade happened. Amazed?

Haven’t tested this out myself, though I’m curious to see how this stacks up against MySQL 5.4, which is also aimed at being a high performance release. In another note, it seems like the mysql-cacti-templates could use a bit more verbose documentation.

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MySQL in RHEL5/CentOS5 gets an update

Posted on 12/10/2009, 10:18 pm, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

It’s worth noting that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 has had an update to MySQL in the last month. This naturally means that CentOS 5 also had a similar update. It’s now bumped up to MySQL 5.0.77 (goodbye 5.0.45!; which is what RHEL5 shipped with). This is a moderate security release, so consider updating, if you can afford a mysqld restart.

Read more about the 4 CVE bugs fixed. CentOS followed suit within two weeks.

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SecuRich

Posted on 31/8/2009, 11:35 pm, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

I got to meet, and share a meal with a most interesting Darren Cassar at FRoSCon/OpenSQLCamp, who’s the mastermind behind SecuRich. Some sparse notes, while we await his slides. I think there’s some great potential here, and SecuRich is exciting and should be given some more love.

Designed to work with Sybase and MySQL in mind (because he’s hacking on migrating Sybase to MySQL).

How often do we audit user privileges and access levels? How often do we forget temporary elevated privileges?

What you have in MySQL today: Authentication against ‘username’@’hostname’, and the password is hashed by PASSWORD() function. There is wide range of privileges, and the granting of privileges is controlled.

What are limitations in MySQL today: Password limits are not available (password size limit, password history, password complexity meter, password minimum age), its quite complex to manage, there are no roles, it is easily unsecured (if you provide an access to the MySQL database, you can try brute force attacks, etc.). Once you drop the database, the grants are still there – obsolete grants are not removed.

SECURICH has password limits, reduces complexity to manage, has roles, is a lot more secured, and soon, there will be removal of obsolete grants.

Compatible with MySQL 5.0 and later, as it uses INFORMATION_SCHEMA extensively. It requires I_S.processlist, which is only available in MySQL 5.1 though.

I don’t see why this wouldn’t work on Windows, besides some scripts written in BASH. My only experience with this is however on Linux and OSX.

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