Chrooted environments are known to greatly improve system and application security by providing them with a higher degree of isolation. The objective is to separate as much as possible from other executables and resources the runtime environment of an application so that if a hacker get access to it,the rest of the system is not compromised. This technic is commonly used with MySQL.

Traditionally, the chrooting applies at the file system level, by creating a separated and minimal operating system disk-image.  The operation consists in creating a set of directories (such a /chroot/etc, /chroot/tmp, /chroot/var/tmp, /chroot/usr/local/mysql etc.) and duplicate a minimal number of binary and configuration files into this new directory tree. After setting the right permissions on the new directories, the chrootuid utility is used to execute the application in the restricted environment. …

We have an exciting webinar coming up tomorrow (12/15) on migrating from SQL Server to MySQL.  LiveTime Software is a leader in ITIL service management and help desk products.  They have started offering a free migration service and this webinar will go over everything from toolsets used to character sets. 

You can read more about it and register for this webinar here.  So I know you have an hour you can spare and when it comes time to renew that SQL Server license you’ll be glad you did.

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Oracle has published their promises which have reportedly gone a long way to appeasing the EU, so the likely outcome is the takeover of Sun will be approved in January.

My own personal opinion has been the anti-competitive stance really didn’t hold much water.  Reading Oracle’s promises, none appear very extreme (largely agreeing to maintain the status quo) which would lead you to question why it has taken so long to sort out.  But importantly for getting this resolved they are a concession by Oracle and a win for the EU.

 Hopefully shortly the mop up can begin.

The full Oracle press release …

In a 10-point press release issued today Oracle has listed a series of "commitments" regarding their acquisition of MySQL by way of acquiring Sun.

I am not impressed.

As a former employee of a large Internet company (the largest at the time, in fact) that used both Oracle and MySQL, I'm utterly puzzled by this. I can't think of why we should trust Oracle to do right by the users of MySQL--especially the non-paying users.

You see, for years Oracle worked agressively behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such a "toy" instead of their flagship product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. In some cases the discounts were so impressive that …

Cassandra is fast emerging as one of the key NoSQL databases.  While we often express that the point of NoSQL is to offer more choice than an “RDBMS” hammer for every nail, there are practical reasons why a small number of stack technologies gain dominance and others circle on the sidelines.

Cassandra has already ticked many of the boxes needed to shoot it into the stratosphere as a widely used, default database platform.  Especially so in the web world where high scalability, high availability, open source and being proven by a bigger fish all matter.  Specifically Cassandra has:

• The ability to scale across many nodes
• The ability to scale to many hundreds of gigabytes of data
• High availability, losing a node doesn’t take down the cluster & online node provisioning and data distribution (and automated …

TPC database benchmarks—which database vendors tune specifically for—are a useful objective comparison for buyers of databases. Unfortunately, there is no such comparison in the cloud, and the current cost/comparison approach used by TPC doesn’t fit the cloud.

Here are the problems:

1. TPC doesn’t include costs that are included in the cloud: Public cloud services bundle the costs of everything into their pricing. TPC eliminates things like: electricity, network connectivity, people to run the service, networking equipment (e.g. switches, cables, internet connectivity, etc.), load balancers, modems, Ethernet cards, etc. The public cloud is really a total cost of ownership, while TPC costs are not. So any cost/performance between onsite and cloud solutions compares apples to oranges.

2. TPC assumes that the expenses included above are paid in advance for three …

A Hard Look Into Replication For some time now I've been struggling with a slave that invariably stays behind its master. I have been looking at every detail I can possibly think and in the process discovered a number of replication details I wasn't aware until now. I haven't too much information about them in the documentation, but they can affect the way you look at your slaves.
Seconds Behind Master This is the first value that to look at when evaluating replication, most of the monitoring systems I know of rely on it. According to the manual:
When the slave SQL thread is actively running
(processing updates), this field is the number of
seconds that have elapsed since the timestamp of the
most recent event on the master executed by that thread.
In fast networks, most of the time, this is an accurate estimate of …

MySQL Workbench provides secured access to MySQL Instances and Servers using SSH. The follow FAQ formated blog post shows a few details on what this is and how it works.

What is SSH?
A secure shell and communications tool

Secure Shell

• Replaces older insecure telnet, rsh, rlogin, rcp
• Provides the same functionality with added security.
• Avoids passing clear text user-ids & passwords
• Supports strong encryption for user authentication

Secure communications

• All TCP traffic sent through ssh can be strongly encrypted.
• Means that various TCP protocols can be given the same strong level of encryption as the ssh channel.

How is SSH used in Workbench?
Two ways

• As a secure communication tunnel for Direct MySQL connections
• As a method to remotely …

Lots of people writing about Snorkle again today ,Monty Says, help saving MySQL

He gives us different options, a , b or c .. but I , and some others, want an option d

No I don't trust Oracle, it's not like they have been a very good Open Source Citizen, yes they contribute to the kernel and other projects but my feeling says it's only because they have to (Kernel, Xen and others ) not because they Want to (thinking about Unfakable etc) , if they would really want to they probably would work with the CentOS community more etc, and as Monty mentions their InnoDB track record could be better.

But on the other hand I don't think the EU should block the deal because Monty wants his baby back , cheap , as honestly imvho that's what they really want, be able to buy MySQL back for a nice price, either beceause Oracle is being forced by the …

As of revision 236, Kontrollbase has officially ended support for all versions of Internet Explorer. It supports Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Camino, Konqueror, and others. This official detection and alert process is a result of IE not displaying various items that work perfectly fine in every other browser. Given that there are much more important [...]