This is a presentation I gave at the Cloud Expo Europe in London on the 21st of May 2009.

I speak about: Caching the results of processed data - data that had business logic applied to it - to the database to be re-used later.

Caching Business Logic in the Database

If you're in airline business, what you do has a lot of impact. Airports are crossroads of emotions, dramas, life-changing events. What you do can give you a lot of satisfaction, as well as bring a lot of satisfaction to passengers.

Doing databases, or, at least, working on MySQL, to me feels the same. I feel personally responsible for success or failure of the entire organization, in other words, whether our, MySQL, "flight" is on time. Emotionally, this is very hard. Hard to objectively accept and tackle mistakes, hard to stay motivated when you feel that your contribution is not making a difference.
But it's what it makes a dream job, too, at least for me.

Bugs like Bug#8523, and before that, Bug#989 is what makes MySQL an airline company.
So if you're on the other side of it, be sure, your …

In the previous blog, I mentioned SQL Editor. NetBeans has improved it in every release in the past 2 years and it looks great these days. Here’s a sneak-peek;

This figure shows the SQL Editor window along with the results shown for the command executed, written in the editor (select * from nbusers). Also, you can see numerous toolbar buttons, and results are shown in similar way as if it was any CRUD application. We will discuss this in more detail in following section and follow-up blogs.

Key Features..

Execute Command

To execute any SQL query within the …

I’ve had several customers in the last week or so who need a way to verify that their application will work well after an upgrade. I’m seeking input on a new tool to help with MySQL upgrades. Please add comments, either here or on the bug report, or on the mailing list topic.

If someone wants to sponsor this work, that would also be welcomed.

I’m pleased to announce a new version of libdrizzle! This is mostly a bug fixing and maintenance release before I start in on more significant development. One of the new features I added was a hook to be able to use your own I/O event mechanism rather than the default poll(). This will allow you to use libraries like libevent, which can be useful when dealing with a large number of file descriptors, or to mix with other file descriptors in your application (for example, you could listen on other fd’s alongside the non-blocking Drizzle/MySQL socket connections). There is not much for examples or documentation yet with this feature, but for now you can email or find me in #drizzle on irc.freenode.net if you would like to know more.

One of the next steps with libdrizzle is a better protocol abstraction, since the Drizzle protocol is diverging quite a bit from how the MySQL …

InfoWorld has declined to post my review of "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" because it is unrelated to open source.  Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Having run a ten marathons, countless half-marathons and a few 100+ mile cycling days, I am sometimes asked what the appeal is of long distance running or cycling.  Despite he fact that I have been running for more than 30 years, it's not easy to explain.  Mostly I think you either get it, or you don't and no attempt to dissect the experience will make much sense.  But luckily, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has penned a short book of essays called "What I Talk …

The reason for yesterday’s Basic OS/MySQL Security was a request to review a system and I was given the production server ‘root’ password in an email. Never email a ‘root’ password, especially including the hostname as well. Email is an insecure protocol that can be monitored by hackers. However, today’s basic security tip following a look at the system is:

Never store the MySQL ‘root’ user password in a ~root/.my.cnf file.

There is simply no reason to do so, and you expose your database to destruction or manipulation when a user has access to the ‘root’ OS user, for example via sudo.

I’ve heard excuses why the ‘root’ MySQL password has to be in a file, I’ve yet to be convinced.

Do you need to store a MySQL password in a file? Yes. Connection management for your application is an …

This is the 148th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

PostgreSQL

Since PGCon ‘09 has concluded not long ago (and not far away), let’s start with Postgres stuff, much of which has to do with the convention.

Here are Robert Treat’s reflections on PGCon 2009, on his zillablog: “ . . . PGCon always presents the strongest line up of Postgres information available, and this year was certainly no exception.”

Josh Berkus was there, of course, and he sends two detailed reports: …

Here’s a simple and convenient trick that I use quite often for doing repetitive MySQL script executes or to bypass file upload limits in phpMyAdmin/Apache. This example is based off my WAMP install but the procedure is the same for Linux too.

1. Browse to the directory where your phpMyAdmin is installed and create a folder called “upload”.  Paste any (as many) SQL scripts you would like to run in this folder.  Sorry, I blurred the name out on mine for security reasons.

2.  Open your phpMyAdmin config file (config.inc.php).  You’ll find this in the root folder of your phpMyAdmin directory.

3.  In config.inc.php, edit the upload directory as shown circled below and save.

4. Now when you go into phpMyAdmin, you’ll see a new dropdown in the import tab that lists all the files you’ve inserted into the “upload” directory you created in step #1 above.

So the next time …

Recently I needed to replicate between MySQL and another database technology. You might say, why on earth would you want to do something like that, but believe me there are reasons and definitely not (to go away from MySQL to some other DB technology like Oracle or SQL server). Unsurprisingly there are quite a few different tools to do it from any platform towards MySQL but very few which do it the other way round, just to name a couple: Golden Gate and DSCallards.