This blog post was co-authored by Peter Sylvester and Valerie Parham-Thompson

Introduced in version 10.1.3 (and with substantial changes in 10.1.4), the MariaDB data encryption at rest feature allows for transparent encryption at the tablespace level for various storage engines, including InnoDB and Aria.

Before now, there have been only two widely accepted encryption methods for MySQL/MariaDB: encryption at the file system level, or encryption at the column level. For comparison, we’ll do a brief overview of how these work, as well as the pros and cons typically associated with each option.

File System Encryption

This is performed by setting a file system to be encrypted at the block level within the operating system itself, and then specifying that the encrypted volume should be the location of the data directory for MySQL/MariaDB. You can also use encrypted volumes to store MariaDB binary logs. …

Hello dear readers and attendees,

This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College’s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630.

I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you’d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I’ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame.

Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here:

…

Amazon has just released their RDS Migration Tool, and Pythian has recently undertaken training to use for our clients. I wanted to share my initial thoughts on the tool, give some background on its internals, and provide a walk-through on the functionality it will be most commonly used for.

There are many factors to consider when evaluating cloud service providers, including cost, performance, and high availability and disaster recovery options. One of the most critical and overlooked elements of any cloud offering though, is the ease of migration. Often, weeks are spent evaluating all of the options only to discover after the choice is made that it will take hours of expensive downtime to complete the migration, and that there is no good rollback option in the case of failure.

In order to reduce the friction inherent in the move to a DBaaS offering, Amazon has developed an RDS Migration tool. This is an in-depth look at this new …

Interview mit Lukas und mir auf der DevOpsCon 2015 in Berlin, kurz nach dem Talk über Private Cloud mit OpenSource.

It had been in the making for long time. Google announced that Google Code would be closing, and since then the Continuent team has been hard at work to handle the transition. You can guess it: this operation would have been quicker if it had been done by a small company like we were one year ago, but being part of a large corporation introduces some constraints that have affected our schedule.

However, our wish has always been, and still is, to keep Tungsten Replicator as an open source product, with full functionalities and with the full benefits that the open source development model offers.

Today, Tungsten Replicator is available on GitHub as …

The fsfreeze command, is used to suspend and resume access to a file system. This allows consistent snapshots to be taken of the filesystem. fsfreeze supports Ext3/4, ReiserFS, JFS and XFS.

A filesystem can be frozen using following command:

# /sbin/fsfreeze -f /data

Now if you are writing to this filesystem, the process/command will be stuck. For example, following command will be stuck in D (UNINTERUPTEBLE_SLEEP) state:

# echo “testing” > /data/file

Only after the filesystem is unfreezed using the following command, can it continue:

# /sbin/fsfreeze -u /data

As per the fsfreeze main page, “fsfreeze is unnecessary for device-mapper devices. The device-mapper (and LVM) automatically freezes filesystem on the device when a snapshot creation is requested.”

fsfreeze is provided by the util-linux package in RHEL systems. Along with userspace support, fsfreeze also …

Foto: Ana Rey CC-BY-SA-2.0El “Concurso Universitario de Software Libre” (CUSL) es una iniciativa similar a la del Google Summer of Code, pero específicamente dirigida la comunidad universitaria y de estudiantes de bachillerato españoles y organizada por una grupo de Oficinas de software libre de universidades.

Como parte del esfuerzo para promover el crecimiento del ecosistema del software libre, así como introducir a talento joven en el desarrollo de aplicaciones y tecnologías libres, DBAHire.com acaba de convertirse en patrocinador plata de la competición, proporcionando recursos para los premios, gastos de …

Daniel was tracking down what appeared to be a networking problem….

• server reported 113 (No route to host)
• However, an strace did not reveal the networking stack ever returning that.
• On the other side, IP packets were actually received.
• When confronted with mysteries like this, I get suspicious – mainly of (fellow) programmers.
• I suggested a grep through the source code, which revealed  return -EHOSTUNREACH;
• Mystery solved, which allowed us to find what was actually going on.

Lessons:

1. Don’t just believe or presume the supposed origin of an error.
2. Programmers often take shortcuts that cause grief later. I fully appreciate how the above code came about, but I still think it was wrong. Mapping a “similar” situation onto an existing …

In the beginning was the MySQL command line and it was good. Verbose yes, error prone yes, and even tedious. But it was good. The UPDATE USER set SELECT_PRIV=’Y’, DROP_PRIV_’Y”, UPDATE_PRIV=’Y’,……,LAST_BLOODY_PRIV=’Y”; type errors have caught of us old timers. But it was still good.

Then came some GUI tools that were okay. Not great but they had their uses.

And then came MySQL Workbench. And it was very good.

Now there is MySQL Workbench 6.2 and it is excellent. It came out in Beta last week and has built on the proven success of its predecessors. All the usual stuff is there – Server Status, Users & Privileges, Startup/Shutdown, logs, Dashboard, Performance Reports and more. But there area whole bunch of subtle little tweaks that make it easier to use.

For instance, the VISUAL EXPLAIN allows toggling between the visual display and the tabular display. Plus you can now get query …

“There are four things that motivate open source development teams:
1. The challenge/puzzle of programming, 2. Need for the software, 3. Personal advancement, 4. Belief in open source” — Bruce Momjian.

On PostgreSQL and the challenges of motivating and managing open source teams, I have interviewed Bruce Momjian, Senior Database Architect at EnterpriseDB, and Co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group and Core Contributor.

RVZ

Q1. How did you manage to transform PostgreSQL from an abandoned academic project into a commercially viable, now enterprise relational database?

Bruce Momjian: Ever since I was a developer of database …