If you happen to work with personal data, chances are you are subject to SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) whether you like it or not.

One of the worst aspects of this is that if you want to be able to analyse your data and you replicate out to another host, you have to find a way of anonymizing the information. There are of course lots of ways of doing this, but if you are replicating the data, why not anonymize it during the replication?

Of the many cool features in Tungsten Replicator, one of my favorites is filtering. This allows you to process the stream of changes that are coming from the data extracted from the master and perform operations on it. We use it a lot in the replicator for ignoring tables, schemas and columns, and for ensuring that we have the correct information within the THL.

Given this, let’s use it to anonymize the data as it is being replicated so that we don’t need to post-process it for analysis, and …

I’m sitting here in the lounge at SFO thinking back on the last week, the majority of which has been spent meeting my new workmates and attending the Percona MySQL conference.

For me it has been as much of a family reunion as it has been about seeing the wonderful things going on in MySQL.

Having joined Continuent last month after an ‘absence’ in NoSQL land of almost 2.5 years, joining the MySQL community again just felt like coming home after a long absence. And that’s no bad thing. On a very personal level it was great to see so many of my old friends, many of whom were not only pleased to see me, but pleased to see me working back in the MySQL fold. Evidently many people think this is where I belong.

What was great to see is that the MySQL community is alive and well. Percona may be the drivers behind the annual MySQL conference that we have come to know, but …

I’ve just completed my first month here at Continuent, strangely back into the MySQL ecosystem which I have been working in for some time before I joined CouchOne, and then Couchbase, two and half years ago. Making the move back to MySQL is both an experience, and somehow, comfortable…

Continuent produce technology that makes for easier replication between MySQL servers and, more importantly, more flexible solutions when you need to scale out by providing connector and management functionality for your MySQL cluster. That means that you can easily backup, add slaves, and create complex replication scenarios such as multi-master, and even multiple-site, multiple-master topologies. This functionality is split over two products, Continuent Tungsten, which is the cluster management product, and the open source Tungsten Replicator, which provides the basic replication functionality.

Those who know me well will know that I am no fan …

Before moving to Couchbase and working with NoSQL technology I had for years been a MySQL user. Making that leap from MySQL to NoSQL requires a number of changes, not least of which to the way you structure your data and then query it. 

I’ve tried to distil the first part of that process down into a simpler form and steps in a new blog post oat the Couchbase blog http://blog.couchbase.com/how-move-mysql-couchbase-server-20-part-1