As stated in the 5.6.6 release notes, the default value of –bind-address has changed from IPv4-specific “0.0.0.0″ to “*” – the latter value which allows MySQL to bind to IPv6 interfaces by default.  There are a few implications to this change.

First, make sure you’ve hardened both your IPv4 and your IPv6 access points to your MySQL server.  If you are running IPv4 interfaces only, you can also change the –bind-address value back to the previous default value of “0.0.0.0″.  Because MySQL now listens by default on both IPv4 and IPv6 interfaces, an installation that has only hardened IPv4 interfaces may find unaddressed vulnerabilities exposed via the IPv6 interface that is now used …

In cloud environments or other secure environments, you may want to lock your database down, allowing or disallowing certain grants or capabilities outside the database. One potential security issue is the use of LOAD DATA INFO and SELECT INTO OUTFILE, depending on what files that exist in directories the MySQL server has access to, or even if you have concerns with any database user ever having any access to the file system outside of the database. A few months ago, with version 5.5-25a-27.1, Percona extended this security feature so that you can disable LOAD DATA INFILE and SELECT INTO OUTFILE, simply called "secure-file-priv". This feature is extremely easy to use-- simply specify it in your my.cnf. You can set it a number of ways:

For instance, if you wanted to limit LOAD DATA INFILE or SELECT INTO OUTFILE to /var/tmp:

secure-file-priv = /var/tmp

Or if you wanted to disable it completely, specify no …

Killing long-running idle transactions is a good way to increase the uptime of a MySQL server. This may sound strange, but open transactions will eventually bring the server down, and it is better to hurt a single application than the many that will be hurt when that happens.

Long-running idle transactions are usually caused by a programmer mistake or an unexpected condition that causes an application not to be able to do its work. The potential number of sources for such problems is unlimited, so it’s virtually impossible to prevent long-running transactions. You can find and solve them when they happen, but you can’t ensure that you’ll never get one from an unexpected source (because, by definition, the source is unexpected).

That is why it’s a good idea to run an idle-transaction killer. There are also other types of things you can profitably kill and help your uptime even more, but those are sometimes more complex to …

The Boston MySQL Users Group meets tonight and I will be presenting on the new features in MySQL 5.6. And I will have two FREE passes to MySQL Connect! See you at the Microsoft NERD Center at 7!

An INSERT does not delay me much. At least, it does not necessarily block a PHP MySQL script immediately. The asynchronous query feature of the mysqlnd library helps out. A walkthrough what mysqlnd can do today and could do in theory.

Traditional synchronous API

$ret = $handle1->query("INSERT ...");
$ret = $handle1->query("INSERT ...");

By default, mysqli_query() is a blocking API call. It sends the query to MySQL and waits for MySQL to reply. Let’s see what happens in general when executing two INSERT statements. PHP offers no parallel processing language primitives such as threads and thus, the two INSERT statements run in a serial fashion. Execution times add up.

In end of May I told about the numbering plans for the next version of MariaDB in the blog post What comes in between MariaDB now and MySQL 5.6?. We received quite a lot of feedback and criticism on the idea of calling the next version MariaDB 10.0. Here is a little more information about why it makes sense to call the next version 10.0.

This is not news for most of you. MariaDB is not just a set of patches applied on top of MySQL. MariaDB includes features which are similar to the corresponding features in MySQL, but the implementations differ, like for example the thread pool, microsecond support and …

Get started on the world's most popular open source database by taking the MySQL for Beginners training course. Students who have taken this 4 day course have described it as "perfect", "very useful", "just what I needed".

This instructor-led hands-on class covers the fundamentals of SQL and relational databases, introducing you to MySQL tools and features.

Take this class at a time and place adapted to you:

• From your home or office at a time suits you: With Training-on-Demand you can get started within 24-hrs with instructor delivery and hands-on exercises when you choose
• From your home or office at one of the 528! scheduled events: With the Live-Virtual delivery you attend a live instructor delivery without any travel costs
• At a teaching center: A sample of the events scheduled in different locations/languages is shown below:

Killing long-running idle transactions is a good way to increase the uptime of a MySQL server. This may sound strange, but open transactions will eventually bring the server down, and it is better to hurt a single application than the many that will be hurt when that happens. Long-running idle transactions are usually caused by a programmer mistake or an unexpected condition that causes an application not to be able to do its work.

Scalexis Inc, web performance/scalability consulting firm in Toronto, is looking for a full-time consultant. Being a consulting company on the high-demand market of web application scalability consulting and high-performance web applications development, we need an employee that could perform both web application development and web application performance consulting work.

The main duty of the employee would be to work directly with the customers’ operations teams to detect, analyze and fix performance problems and plan application scalability in accordance with customers’ needs/requests.

The employee would work in a small team of highly professional consultants helping the company to handle growing demand for web applications performance consulting services.

Position is in Toronto. Telecommuting is not possible.

Being a consulting-related position, it …

As a continuation of previous post, now, I will show how to make a mysql plugin for ldap authentication.

Get the mysql-server source code at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ (http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.5/mysql-5.5.27.tar.gz/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/)

Installing necessary packages

yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
yum install cmake ncurses-devel

Download source code, build and start MySQL Server

wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.5/mysql-5.5.27.tar.gz/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
tar -xzf mysql-5.5.27.tar.gz
cd mysql-5.5.25

# Preconfiguration setup
groupadd mysql
useradd -r -g mysql mysql

# Beginning of source-build specific instructions
cmake .
make
make install

# Postinstallation setup
chown -R mysql .
chgrp -R mysql .
./scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
chown -R root .
chown -R mysql data

cp support-files/mysql.server …