Ever wanted to use your server's OS for authenticating MySQL users ? Or the corporate LDAP repository ?

Unfortunately options like the above are plentiful nowadays. And providing hard-coded support for protocol X or service Y is not the best possible idea. MySQL 5.5 has taken the step into the right direction by providing an infrastructure allowing one to make the server understand different authentication protocols by creating a set of simple plugins (one for the client and one for the server). So now you can easily extend MySQL to search for and authenticate users in your favorite user directory. In fact the API supplied is so versatile that we took the possibility to re-design the current "native" authentication mechanism into a built-in always-on plugin ! OK, let me give you an example: Imagine we have a bunch of users defined in your OS, e.g. we have a user joro with his respective password. And we have a MySQL …

At OSSCube, we are looking for “C” and UNIX Developers for Pune. The desire profile would be required to Designing of the functional document and involved in Coding in C/C++, Shell Script according to the functional document and Testing.

Responsibilities (includes, but not limited to):

• Handling testing, system integration, debugging & troubleshooting of the application.
• Ensuring adherence to quality norms across the development & implementation process.
• Designing of the functional document. C/C++, Shell Script according to the functional document and Testing.
• Analysis of the specifications provided by the Client
• Designing of the functional document.

Experience:

• 3yrs+ on C and UNIX

Technical Skills:

• BE/B.tech/MCA qualified with 3+ years of relevant experience …

We are starting the new year with a lot of zeal and energy and looking forward to a great year ahead. In the coming posts, we will give you some reasons to celebrate with us!

OSSCube marks its entry into the European market with a landmark joint venture with one of the leading open source consulting providers in UK - One Point Consulting Ltd. Known as OSSCube UK, the joint venture will address the needs of the European market. One Point brings a range of skills and partnerships including Zimbra, MindTouch and Processmaker, which complements the OSSCube service lines. OSSCube UK will pro-actively be promoting the solutions and services of OSSCube including SugarCRM, Zend, LAMP, MySQL and …

Ever wanted to use your server's OS for authenticating MySQL users ? Or the corporate LDAP repository ?

Unfortunately options like the above are plentiful nowadays. And providing hard-coded support for protocol X or service Y is not the best possible idea. MySQL 5.5 has taken the step into the right direction by providing an infrastructure allowing one to make the server understand different authentication protocols by creating a set of simple plugins (one for the client and one for the server). So now you can easily extend MySQL to search for and authenticate users in your favorite user directory. In fact the API supplied is so versatile that we took the possibility to re-design the current "native" authentication mechanism into a built-in always-on plugin ! OK, let me give you an example: Imagine we have a bunch of users defined in your OS, e.g. we have a user joro with his respective password. And we have a MySQL …

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2010. That’s about 26 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 13 new posts, not bad for the first year! There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 5kb.

The busiest day of the year was April 26th with 779 views. The most popular post that day was Oracle starts to monetize Free Software, is it wrong?.

OK, yes, I was kinda sad enough at the end of December to convert 2011 to hex to find it is 7DB.  Which I think is appropriate as for me at least this will be the year of Drizzle7 DBMS.

It may be the winter holiday season but many of us Drizzle developers haven’t taken much of a break.  I have been working hard to keep our bug count down and will be working on some really cool new features this month.  Brian Aker has also announced things that he has been working on in this mailing list post.

So, what can you expect from the Drizzle project in year 7DB?  Here is a sneak preview of a few things off the top of my head (I really hope I haven’t missed anyone here):

1. Completion of replication support (thanks to …

One of the query optimization scenarios I’ve seen a lot over the years is finding something within some distance from a point. For example, finding people within some distance of yourself, apartments in a radius from a postal code, and so on.

These queries usually use the great-circle formula. That might be because Google finds lots of pages claiming that this is the right way to do a radius search. “The earth is not flat!”, they all say. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the great-circle formula is a good approach. It’s usually a really bad approach, in fact. It’s needlessly precise for most things, not precise enough for others, and it’s an expensive query to execute; all the trig functions tend to eat a bunch of CPU, and make it impossible to use ordinary indexes. This is true for all of the databases I’ve used — MySQL, Postgres, and SQL Server.

The great-circle formula is needlessly precise for a few …

Those who read what I write here know that I am sometimes pretty opinionated, and that I have some strong feelings about some things. I am not to discuss politics here, but I will discuss one topic that that is one of the subjects closest to my heart, a thing that I think is crucial in todays world, and that has been a driving force in making the world what it is, both good and bad. That things is democracy.

Way back when I was 20-something I begun to appreciate what is sometimes called "Adult cartoons", then not Adult in the sense of being sexually explicit, but rather Adult in the sense that these cartoons are about things closer to us adults. I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Sweden this is pretty popular (you might have seen the "Rocky" cartoon for example, published in many languages, which is pretty typical of this genre).

You may think what you want about something like the "Rocky" cartoon, that is …

In the old days everything was simpler. We had one maker of our favourite database management system and possibly the choice between different Storage Engines. Mostly the decision has to be taken between MyISAM and InnoDB. When you care about your data integrity you have chosen InnoDB.

Nowadays it is more complex. We have several different makers of our favourite database management system: Oracle/MySQL, Monty Program AB and Percona with their products: MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server.
We have different performant and reliable transactional Storage Engines: InnoDB, XtraDB and PBXT and to make it more difficult we can have InnoDB even as built-in and as plug-in in the same release (5.1 only).

XtraDB is a fork of InnoDB and claims to be a drop-in replacement for InnoDB. They look quite similar but have partly different features. When you come to a new customer it makes sense to find out which version of InnoDB/XtraDB they …