Requirement 6 of PCI DSS v1.2 states that in order to be compliant, an organization must: “Develop and maintain secure systems and applications” “Unscrupulous individuals use security vulnerabilities to gain privileged access to systems. Many of these vulnerabilities are fixed by vendor- provided security patches, which must be installed by the entities that manage the [...]

One of the first special reports I wrote for 451 Group was an analysis of the open source systems management vendors on the scene — GroundWork, Hyperic, Zenoss, OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and some others. These named ones are those that made it and while there was some reckoning in the market and there have been changes, it is interesting to see these players still plugging away, pushing into new markets and powering open source for systems, network and application monitoring and management, including cloud computing environments.

When acquired by SpringSource a year ago, there was some question as to the real value of open source systems monitoring and management company Hyperic, which had taken the …

Requirement 4 of PCI DSS v1.2 states that we must: “Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks” Specifically, “Sensitive information must be encrypted during transmission over networks that are easily accessed by malicious individuals. Misconfigured wireless networks and vulnerabilities in legacy encryption and authentication protocols can be continued targets of malicious individuals who [...]

Last week I was in Manchester for the 2010 UKUUG Spring Conference, right .. make that 2 weeks ago , :)

The UKUUG usually hosts the more interesting conferences around ... , it's not just the schedule that attrackts me , yes there's the strong focus towards Larger Scale Unix (and mostly Linux) deployments and how to manage them, but there's also the opportunity to chat in real life with the Devops from across the chunnel.

Spending time with R.I.Pienaar, Julian Simpson, Simon Wilkinson , Alex Davies , Simon Riggs , Josette, and many others is always fun .

As I …

At this year’s O’Reilly MySQL Conference we will be showing the latest version of our MySQL storage engine, TokuDB v3.1.

Come visit us at Table T1 in the OEM section of the Exhibit Hall.

We will be talking about how TokuDB can dramatically improve performance for:

• Social Networking applications
• eCommerce Personalization
• Logfile Analysis
• High-speed Webcrawling
• Real-time clickstream analysis

Customers pick TokuDB for:

• 10x-50x faster indexing for faster querying
• Full support for ACID transactions
• Short recovery time (seconds or minutes, not hours or days)
• Immunity to database aging to eliminate performance degradation and maintenance headaches
• 5x-15x data compression for reduced disk use and lower storage costs

Requirement 3 of the PCI DSS v1.2 is: “Protect Stored Cardholder Data” As vague as that sounds, the PCI DSS enumerates exactly what that covers: Data Element Storage Permitted Protection Required PCI DSS Req 3.4 Primary Account Number Yes Yes Yes Cardholder Name* Yes Yes No Service Code* Yes Yes No Expiration Date* Yes Yes [...]

This release of Workbench has shown some major improvements. Especially in looks and feel, so I want to thank the team for those improvements at this time. I would like to take the opportunity though to point out some short commings or inconsistencies – at least in my oppinion. These are not bugs per say – for those see the bug reporting system – but just things that make using WB not as much pleasure as it could be.

1.) Triggers: Why can’t the handling of triggers be consistent with the way MYSQL stores/handles triggers. Namely each trigger as its own entity. Currently triggers just roll together in the sample as shown below in an example that does nothing but is just used to describe the problem

– Trigger DDL Statements
DELIMITER $$

USE `test`$$CREATE DEFINER=`admin`@`%` TRIGGER `beforeinsert`
BEFORE INSERT On table1
FOR EACH ROW
…

At the UC 2010 I will have a session on MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning. This session will address a lot of the most common performance problems I see in my day to day job with Cluster. A small excerpt of the talk is below here and many other things will be addressed in the session (JOINs, schema optimization, batching, indexes, parameter tuning etc). I hope to see you there!

First a bit on ndb_autoincrement_prefetch_sz and then blobs!

ndb_autoincrement_prefetch_sz

One thing is contention on auto_increments, which can really slow down performance.
By default the ndb_autoincrement_prefetch_sz=1. This means that the mysqld will cache one auto_increment number and then go down to the data …

Thanks to the efforts of the Debian HA Maintainers team, the complete Pacemaker cluster stack is now available in Debian GNU/Linux. Packages are currently included only in Debian unstable (“sid“), but we expect them to make their way into squeeze (and lenny, via backports.org) relatively soon.

See the following links in the Debian package database for details:

• http://packages.debian.org/cluster-glue ( …

I’m excited to share the news that Oracle ACE program has been extended to cover MySQL community now and Pythian’s Sheeri Cabral has become the very first Oracle ACE Director in MySQL expertize area. It’s a special privilege for me to blog about it because I had a pleasure to nominate Sheeri in the first place. Being an Oracle ACE Director myself and knowing what’s involved, I believed that if Oracle ACE program is extended to MySQL, Sheeri must be the number one candidate.

It’s impossible to overestimate Sheeri’s role in the MySQL community — her advocacy for the technology and commitment to building and supporting the community. She’s been presenting about MySQL …