I track security updates for the following vendors: Apple, Cisco, FreeBSD, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. I chose these vendors based on my own needs for the networks and systems I manage. I've also found that updates from these vendors tend to catch the major updates necessary for common software applications. If you have other vendors you would like me to provide updates for, send me a message.

If you have an interest in information security from both a technical and managerial level, check out Principles of Information Security. It does an excellent job of presenting material for both audiences.

Red Hat, Inc.

• RHSA-2010:0108 Moderate: NetworkManager security update
• …

We’ve had a good and successful launch of InfiniDB 1.0 (Feb 1), and while we’re pleased with that accomplishment, we’ve now turned our attention to the next release of InfiniDB, which will be 1.1. We’ve got some nice new features, capabilities, and changes planned for you that aren’t very far away. In addition, we plan on backporting some of these changes to a 1.0 patch release so current users can benefit from them now.

You can find the new, updated roadmRead More...

When modifying VFP Forms to run the MYSQL Backend the first question most likely will be: How do I get the data from MYSQL efficiently to my VFP Form without rewriting the whole thing from scratch. The form previously accessing VFP tables most likely opened them in the Data Environment so it might be tempting to just replace them with remote cursors or with cursor adapters mimicking the VFP tables and views previously used. Granted the Form might just work with minimal effort but in most cases this approach would be very inefficient. At the same token the VFP controls on the form most likely are bound to some cursor/alias by use of the recordsource or controlsource properties. So unless one wants to do a lot of coding establishing those links later, some fitting cursor needs to exist before the controls are initialized.

Lets assume a simple scenario where we have a customer screen, with a field where you enter the customer …

You might not know it, but a lot of time can be spent in ha_innobase::records_in_range while optimizing queries. This function determines the selectivity of predicates in a query using indexes from a table. The Facebook patch for MySQL 5.0 has SHOW STATUS counters for the overhead measured in seconds of the various steps in running a query including Parse_seconds for the time to parse, Pre_exec_seconds for the time to lock tables and authenticate access and Exec_seconds for the time to optimize and execute the query. The total time and hopefully the sum of these variables is reported in Command_seconds for non-replication SQL and Command_slave_seconds for replication SQL.

I restarted a slave and these are the values of the counters after a few hours:

27      Command_seconds
5179    Command_slave_seconds
5134    Exec_seconds
1412    Innodb_records_in_range_seconds
65      Parse_seconds
0       Pre_exec_seconds

About 27% of …

There are those that are very adamant about letting people know that using INFORMATION_SCHEMA can crash your database. For example, in making changes to many tables at once Baron writes:

“querying the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database on MySQL can completely lock a busy server for a long time. It can even crash it. It is very dangerous.”

Though Baron is telling the truth here, he left out one extremely important piece of information: you can actually figure out how dangerous your INFORMATION_SCHEMA query will be, ahead of time, using EXPLAIN.

In MySQL 5.1.21 and higher, not only were optimizations made to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA, but new values were added so that EXPLAIN had better visibility into what MySQL is actually doing. As per …

Over at the OPenARK blog Shlomi Noach argues that using apt-get or yum to install your MySQL instance will one day most likeley break your MySQL setup. Depdendencies, distros not shipping the MySQL version you want to use and on some distro's indeed the mysql vs MySQL issue, agreed, it all makes things less trivial.

However why give up a clean packaged system if there are other ways out ?

First of all by claiming that such an installation can break a working production environment looks to me like admitting you don't have a split development, production environment and that rather than testing stuff upfront indeed you just hack a long in production.

So rather than using a tarball for the MySQL instance an --force to satisfy the missing dependencies (hence also cluttering your system) , a much cleaner and less error prone setup …

Answering questions asked on the site.

Travis asks:

I just read your excellent post: Hierarchical data in MySQL: parents and children in one query.

I am currently trying to do something very similar to this. The main difference is, I am working with data that is in a nested set.

I would like to construct a query that will return a resultset of nodes matched with LIKE, the ancestors of each of these nodes, and the immediate children of each of these nodes.

This is a very interesting question: it allows to demonstrate the usage of three types of indexes usable by MyISAM tables: BTREE, SPATIAL and FULLTEXT.

…

When I saw Shlomi's post on why not to use apt-get or yum for MySQL, I thought immediately that his conclusions are quite reasonable. What you get from the Linux distributions is not the same thing that you find in the official MySQL downloads page. Now, whether you value more the completeness of the server or the ease of administration through the distribution installation tools, it's up to you and your business goals. We at the MySQL team have organized a meeting with the Linux distributions with the intent of finding out which differences and problems we may have with each other, and to solve them by improving communication. What follows is a summary of what happened in Brussels during the meeting.

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Is there a performance penalty using a pure Python database interface? Yes there is. But how much? .. also depends on who wrote it.

I started implementing some benchmarking for MySQL Connector/Python. Main reason is to identified bottlenecks or just plain bad coded. Another reasons: it's cool and the question was raised during my talk at FOSDEM and also online.

Oh, yes, MySQL Connector/Python ain't fast right now. Just compare a script spawning 10 threads opening 1000 connections. It indeed just connects.

mysql.connector 0.1.3-devel average: 0.0091820
MySQLdb 1.2.3c1             average: 0.0026477
oursql 0.9.1                average: 0.0007394

(MacOSX 10.6.2, MySQL …

How To Set Up MySQL Database Replication With SSL Encryption On CentOS 5.4

This tutorial describes how to set up database replication in MySQL using an SSL connection for encryption (to make it impossible for hackers to sniff out passwords and data transferred between the master and slave). MySQL replication allows you to have an exact copy of a database from a master server on another server (slave), and all updates to the database on the master server are immediately replicated to the database on the slave server so that both databases are in sync. This is not a backup policy because an accidentally issued DELETE command will also be carried out on the slave; but replication can help protect against hardware failures though.