We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha. MariaDB 5.5.20 is the first Alpha release in the 5.5 series. We hope to follow it up soon with a beta 5.5 release.

MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. This is the first 5.5-based release, and we are releasing it now, intentionally without any extra features (and with it missing some planned features) to get it into the hands of any who might want to test it. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into future releases.

As with any alpha release, MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some notes on the release. There is also a  …

News/Feedback:
This week we have some fun audio feedback from Patrick Hurley, a MySQL DBA in the UK.

The Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo is from Tuesday, April 10th through Thursday, April 12th. The conference is at the Santa Clara, CA Convention Center. Early bird pricing ends March 12th, 2012. Use code PL-pod and save 10% off the early bird prices!. Check out the tutorial and session schedule.

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Instead of the usual text-heavy blog posts that appear here, I thought it would be fun to mix things up and do a screencast showing exactly how easy it is to upgrade MySQL to MariaDB:

Some notes:

• The laptop I’m using had MySQL 5.1.55 installed with one database (apart from the system database). Installing MariaDB does not impact existing data in any way and once the install completed I had instant access to my data.
• As part of the install you are given the option to set a new password for the root user. I choose to do it in the video, but you don’t need to. If you leave the password field blank the root password will not be changed. Other database users are preserved, of course.
• As with any database upgrade, before doing this to a production system you should have backups and test.

Links:

Links shown or mentioned in the video:

• …

The MySQL community has something new on their radar. First up, it looks like MySQL is now part of Oracle Software Security Assurance, and this is something all MySQL users should be happy about. Next, it is worth noting that MySQL is now part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update (Oracle CPU), as the MySQL product line has made it into its first Oracle CPU advisory for January 2012.

As part of the MySQL community, CPU’s are new to us — they are released on the Tuesday closest to the 17th day of January, April, July and October. This kind of reminds us of Patch Tuesday, but let’s not digress.

This is the first time MySQL is part of the Critical Patch Update, and the …

In this primer I will show how to improve the security of your MariaDB installation by using two-step verification and how to use it from your Windows GUI client.

Let’s suppose you have your data in MariaDB, installed, say, on Ubuntu. And your users connect to it to run ad hoc queries, using some sort of a Windows GUI client. You don’t want them to write the access password on post-it notes or have it auto-entered by the client. And you don’t want anyone see the password when one of the salespersons connects to the mother ship from his laptop in the Internet café. So you decide to use the two-step verification, just like Google does, to secure the access to the data.

If you don’t know what a “two-step verification” is, see, for example, this introductory video by Google.

So, 2-step verification looks great, but how …

I’ll be speaking at FOSDEM 2012 conference at MySQL and Friends track (schedule is yet to appear) with two talks “How to offload MySQL server with Sphinx” and “Sphinx performance top secrets”. Additionally I’ll be co-presenting “Sphinx users stories” with SkySQL engineers and customers.

Looking forward to meet you at FOSDEM 2012!

Oracle WebLogic Server 12c is now available and comes with a zip installer.

This video shows how to develop and deploy a Java EE 6 application on WebLogic 12c using NetBeans. It builds a simple application using Java Persistence API 2.0, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, Servlets 3.0, Java API for RESTful Web Services 1.1, Java Server Faces 2.0, and Contexts & Dependency Injection 1.0. The video also explains how to configure MySQL database in NetBeans and use it for accessing the database tables in the Java EE 6 applications.

Enjoy!

You can also check out the sample code built in this application …

Oracle WebLogic Server 12c is now available and comes with a zip installer.

This video shows how to develop and deploy a Java EE 6 application on WebLogic 12c using NetBeans. It builds a simple application using Java Persistence API 2.0, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, Servlets 3.0, Java API for RESTful Web Services 1.1, Java Server Faces 2.0, and Contexts & Dependency Injection 1.0. The video also explains how to configure MySQL database in NetBeans and use it for accessing the database tables in the Java EE 6 applications.

Enjoy!

You can also check out the sample code built in this application …

This week we play a bunch of bloopers, some you have heard, some you haven't, as our year-end gift to you. We hope these make you laugh!

Sugus candy

This week, we continue our discussion about MySQL and its forks. We discuss the Percona server and MariaDB.

Percona Live comes to Washington, DC on Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. There is a 50% discount for students, faculty and staff of educational organizations, and a 35% discount for government employees. http://www.percona.com/live/dc-2012/

Percona Server
Percona software

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