We’ve seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today’s technology world — where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount — exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs.

Open source software continues to be a critical part of software development, systems administration, IT operations and more, but much of the action in leveraging modern cloud computing and services-based infrastructures centers on APIs. Open APIs are the new open source.

Read the full story at LinuxInsider.

I recently found Todd's posts on interceptors which allow callbacks (called interceptors) to be registered with the connector so that you can intercept a statement execution, commit, or any of the many extension points supported by Connector/Java. This is a language feature that allow you to implement a number of new features without having to change the application code such as load-balancing policies, profiling queries or transactions, or debugging an application.

Since Python is a dynamic language, it is easy to add interceptors to any …

There have been some request to have some reconnect possibilities in Connector/Python. I’m wondering now whether there should be some automatic reconnect on certain errors within the database driver.

My personal feeling is to have no automatic reconnect within Connector/Python and the programmer has to come up with retrying transactions herself.

For example:

        cnx.disconnect() # For testing..
        tries = 2
        while tries > 0:
                tries -= 1
                try:
                        cursor.execute("INSERT INTO t1 (c1) VALUES ('ham')")
                        cnx.commit()
                except mysql.connector.InterfaceError:
                        if tries == 0:
                                print "Failed inserting data after retrying"
                                break
                        else:
                                print …

I ran into an issue installing the MySQLdb module.

>>> import MySQLdb
/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.py:3: UserWarning: Module _mysql was already imported from /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.pyc, but /Users/jhaddad/Downloads/MySQL-python-1.2.3 is being added to sys.path
Traceback (most recent call last):
File ““, line 1, in
File “MySQLdb/__init__.py”, line 19, in
import _mysql
File “build/bdist.macosx-10.7-intel/egg/_mysql.py”, line 7, in
File “build/bdist.macosx-10.7-intel/egg/_mysql.py”, line 6, in __bootstrap__
ImportError: dlopen(/var/root/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg-tmp/_mysql.so, 2): Library not loaded: …

Today we registered MySQL Connector/Python with the Python Package Index (PyPI). It makes installing your favorite connector even easier (provided you first install setuptools or pip):

shell> easy_install mysql-connector
shell> pip install mysql-connector

Please report problems either using Launchpad or MySQL Bugs website.

…

In addition to reporting MySQL Connector/Python bugs on Launchpad, it is now also possible to enter them using http://bugs.mysql.com.

After more than 6 years doing MySQL Support for MySQL AB, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle, it’s time for a change. Time to get back to development!

As of November 2011 I’ll be working full-time on MySQL Connector/Python and other goodies within the MySQL development team at Oracle. Before, this was more or less a pet project done after working hours. However, with the birth of our son Tomas more than a year ago, I’ve been slacking and family got priority.

The idea is to make MySQL Connector/Python the best choice for connecting to MySQL from within your Python code. We still got …

The MySQL Utilities project continues to evolve with key new features for
replication and export. The latest release, 1.0.3, is no exception.

MySQL Utilities is included in the MySQL Workbench product which can be
downloaded from HTTP://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.2.html

If you want the latest developments for MySQL Utilities, you can create a
bazaar branch using the following command:

bzr branch lp:~mysql/mysql-utilities/trunk

New Utility - mysqlrplshow

You can now view a list of the slaves attached to your master with
mysqlrplshow. The utility displays a graph of the master and its slaves y
default but you can also get a list of the slaves in GRID, CSV, TAB, or
VERTICAL format as follows.

• GRID - Displays output formatted like that of the mysql monitor in a grid or table …

There has been a lot of discussions lately about various non-SQL languages that provide access to databases without having to resort to using SQL. I wondered how difficult it would be to implement such an interface, so as an experiment, I implemented a simple interface in Python that similar to the document-oriented interfaces available elsewhere. The interface generate SQL queries to query the database, but does not require any knowlegdge of SQL to use. The syntax is inspired by JQuery, but since JQuery works with documents, the semantics is slightly different.

A simple example would look like this:

from native_db import *
server = Server(host='127.0.0.1')
server.test.t1.insert({'more': 3, 'magic': 'just a test', 'count': 0})
server.test.t1.insert({'more': 3, 'magic': 'just another test', 'count': 0})
server.test.t1.insert({'more': 4, 'magic': 'quadrant', 'count': 0}) …

XKCD (as usual) makes a very good point – this time about password strength, and I reckon it’s something app developers need to consider urgently. Geeks can debate the exact amount of entropy, but that’s not really the issue: insisting on mixed upper/lower and/or non-alpha and/or numerical components to a user password does not really improve security, and definitely makes life more difficult for users.

So basically, the functions that do a “is this a strong password” should seriously reconsider their approach, particularly if they’re used to have the app decide whether to accept the password as “good enough” at all.

Update: Jeff Preshing has written an xkcd password generator. Users probably should choose their own four …