As you may know, since version 5.2.0 (released in April 2010) we support Pluggable Authentication. Using this feature one can implement an arbitrary user authentication and account management policy, completely replacing built-in MariaDB authentication with its username/password combination and mysql.user table.

Also, as you might have heard, Oracle has recently released a PAM authentication plugin for MySQL. Alas, this plugin will not run on MariaDB — although the MySQL implementation of pluggable authentication is based on ours, the API is incompatible. And, being closed source, this plugin cannot be fixed to run in MariaDB. And — I’m not making it up — this plugin does not support communication between the client and the server, so even with this plugin and all the power of PAM the only possible authentication …

As is tradition after the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, there tends to be a storage engine summit right afterwards. This year it was expanded to also include plugins. I must graciously thank Facebook for hosting us at their campus, and giving us a rather healthy lunch, plus fueling us with all those drinks, caffeine and snacks that we needed to keep us going. While standing in the doorway, Mark (Callaghan) pointed to us that a certain other Mark (Zuckerberg) was walking into the campus, just like the rest of us.

The very raw notes are up on the Knowledgebase - Plugins & Storage Engines Summit for MySQL/MariaDB/Drizzle 2011. We definitely did not discuss anything Drizzle related, and we barely had time to focus on plugins, so …

I had a good and lively audience at my presentation today. I was happy to give them a sneek preview of the Mk.III implementation of OQGRAPH.

Oh yeah! I guess I'm announcing the availability of the source code of the MkIII implementation.

Links are in my slides... http://goo.gl/UrybZ

Btw, building the storage engine requires Boost libraries and libJudy installed. It's currently in a MariaDB

MySQL has the well earned reputation for ease-of-use and “15-minutes-to-success”, since we continually focus making the server easy to use. MySQL Workbench provides the visual tools for database design, development, and administration. However, many DBAs prefer using the command-line, and there are many tasks that require the creation scripts for doing the job.

To make it easier to work with the server, the latest release of the MySQL Workbench—version 5.2.31—contain a set of Python scripts intended to make the life easier for DBAs by providing easy-to-use utilities for common tasks, which were introduced in the blog MySQL Workbench: Utilities. The set currently consists of just a few utilities, but will expand over time.

The utilities available in the Workbench are:

…

MySQL Workbench is an extensible tool for database design, development, and administration – with support for python scripting and plugins, that can automate basic tasks.

Starting with MySQL Workbench 5.2.31, and with MySQL designers, developers, and administrators in mind, we’ve added a new plugin called MySQL Utilities. The MySQL Utilities is a set of python scripts that automate basic tasks. And as MySQL Workbench is about helping design, develop and administer databases, we’ve put the MySQL Utilities at your fingertips so you can quickly get to them and get your job done. Users will benefit from proven scripts, leverage the testing and ideas of the community and the experts at MySQL, and avoid having to reinvent common scripts…

Lets go on a quick tour…

The MySQL Utilities Plugin starts a shell that contains a set of python scripts that perform tasks such as copying, exporting, and importing databases, finding …

To automatically create Foreign Key relationships is a typical use case for developers working with the MyISAM storage engine. This has been a popular topic on the Blog and forums so we’re revisiting it here – with a new and improved plugin written in Python.

While the InnoDB storage engine supports foreign keys, MyISAM doesn’t, but developers often pick it for various reasons and leave the application to handle relationships itself. MySQL Workbench can be used to reverse engineer a database to a model to better visualize or maintain it. But since MyISAM doesn’t have foreign keys, databases that use it will be lacking a very important part of it’s structure in the diagrams. You can link the columns manually, using the relationship tool to link columns, but you can also automate that. Databases are usually created so that columns that represent relationships have names that follow some kind of convention or pattern. For …

MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development

MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development, by Sergei Golubchik and Andrew Hutchings, Packt 2010. About 250 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

This book is well worth reading for anyone interested in MySQL internals. I learned a lot from it. It is well-written and understandable. I cannot say that I’m planning to write storage engines or more advanced plugins, but I have a great many ideas how to improve MySQL, and I now understand more clearly which of those are suitable to write as plugins, and of what type of plugin is appropriate. I also think I have a better idea how much work these various ideas might involve.

The book begins …

In MySQL Workbench 5.2.26 a new query execution command is available, where query output is sent as text to the text Output tab of the SQL Editor. Some MySQL Workbench users liked the “Results to Text” option available in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. Cool thing is with a few lines of Python we implemented this command using the SQL Editor scripting API.

For full documentation on scripting and plugin development, refer to the documentation pointers page.

In this post, you will learn:

• Python script for implementing “Results to Text”
• How you can customize the script to deliver your own customized results format command.

Execute Query to Text (accessible from Query …

If you have a wedding photography website, more than likely you want to showcase your work, or the work of your colleagues. You want to do this, without putting up low quality pictures, nor do you want to make your visitors wait 20 seconds before the page loads. Here are two plugins I use for my clients to help with this.

• The Smush.it plugin. This plugin compresses your image using the Smush.it API from Yahoo!, I’ve used it to reduce a page size from 3MB to 1.3MB, which meant that visitors were able to see the site faster, and appreciate the photographs rather than their internet connection.
• W3 Total Cache : This is a fairly advanced plugin that makes your site use MySQL less, and also helps you off load things onto a content delivery network with a few clicks. …

This Thursday (November 26th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia will present the Spider Storage Engine. This session was originally scheduled for October 15th but had to be postponed for technical reasons.

Here's from the abstract: Everybody needs sharding. Which is not easy to maintain. Being tied to the application layer, sharding is hard to export and to interact with. The Spider storage engine, a plugin for MySQL 5.1 and later, solves the problem in a transparent way. It is an extension of partitioning. Using this engine, the user can deal transparently with multiple backends in the server layer. This means that the data is accessible from any application without code changes. This lecture …