EC2 Preparation

First you need to sign up for Amazon's EC2 service and download your X.509 certificate and private key. The certificate and private key files are named as cert-<GUID>.pem and pk-<GUID>.pem. 

Create a directory to hold your EC2 access credentials.

$ mkdir ~/.ec2
$ mv ~/Downloads/*.pem ~/.ec2

Next download the EC2 API command line tools, add it to your PATH and create a few environment variables.

$ cd ~/bin
$ unzip ~/Downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
$ ln -s /ec2-api-tools-1.3-46266 ec2
$ export $EC2_HOME=~/bin/ec2
$ export …

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. …

The latest MySQL 5.5 milestone release offers support for an ANSI/ISO standard feature called the SIGNAL syntax. You can use this syntax inside stored routines (including triggers) to raise an error condition which can be used to invoke specific error handling, or otherwise abort the stored routine. In addition, you can use the SIGNAL syntax to convey information about what went wrong, which may be used by the caller to handle the error.

I have written about MySQL data entry validation procedures in the past. At the time, MySQL did not support any proper means to raise an error condition inside a stored routine, and …

The European Commission has now got a lot of emails! It seems they even have to block some (at least GMail) just to keep their mail server alive. Thank you, all, for helping out, it is working.

As you can see, the emails already have had a small effect that Oracle had to backtrack and make some promises.

In this blog I will explain why these promises are not very helpful, even if they show that even Oracle is a little bit concerned now.

The first thing is of course that

read more

Recent non-Oracle/EC/MySQL news.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Novell reshuffled its Linux business into Security, Management and Operating Platforms business unit.

# HP partnered with Red Hat, Novell and Microsoft to target Sun migrations.

# The US DoJ …

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. …

Tokutek is pleased to announce the beta launch of TokuDB for MySQL, version 3.0. Many of our customers have asked for  transaction capabilities to provide the data integrity their businesses require and in this release we provide:

• Full support for ACID compliant transactions
• Fast recovery time (seconds or minutes, not hours or days)

As with previous versions, v3.0 Beta gives our customers these benefits:

• 20x-50x faster indexing for faster querying
• Immunity to database aging to eliminate performance degradation and maintenance headaches
• 5x-15x data compression for reduced disk use and lower storage costs

Because of its high indexing performance and transaction support, TokuDB is well suited to Web applications that must simultaneously store and …

What is going on with the version numbers coming out of Sun/MySQL?Once upon a time, we had 5.2.Then, to incorporate Falcon, it became 6.0.Somewhere along the line, there was a 5.3.Then a 5.4 appeared which seemed to be 5.1 with performance fixes for InnoDB.Now there is a 5.5, which claims to be a 5.4 with a few stuff added.Stop confusing your community.And whatever happened to community

OverviewWhat's this new …

Good news: As you read this, you can very soon start downloading the first version of MySQL 5.5 from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/.

Some things are the same as before, others are different. Let’s start by looking at the version string, SELECT VERSION();

mysql> SELECT VERSION();
+--------------+
| version()    |
+--------------+
| 5.5.0-m2-log |
+--------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>

And let’s look at the highlights of the release notes, or better still, MySQL 5.5 in a nutshell in the manual on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-nutshell.html. Top of the list is …