SSH tunnels provide a very effective means to access remote services and applications. Not only does it provide encryption of data between hosts, but it allows you to route connections between a sequence of servers, thus chaining connections. A common use of this method is to provide encrypted connections to MySQL servers so that user accounts can be limited to only “localhost” privileges, yet accessed from remote workstations without having to run MySQL+SSL.

The concept is simple, for example let’s say you have three servers: localhost (your workstation in America), a server in Europe, and a server in Japan. You want to access Apache running on port 80 on the Japan server but because of firewall restrictions you cannot access port 80 remotely, and to make things more difficult the Japan server only allows SSH connections from the Europe server’s IP. We can solve this by creating a SSH tunnel that forwards localhost port 8080 …

As an experiment, I have converted the MariaDB Bazaar repository into Git.

https://github.com/atcurtis/mariadb

Should be interesting...

LinkedIn has what they call "inDays" where employees may so something interesting which may not be directly related to their day job. I spent my inDay by porting my old WL820 project (External Language Stored Procedures) to MariaDB 5.3.

The code, as usual, is available on LaunchPad ... To get the branch, simply do:

bzr branch lp:~atcurtis/maria/5.3-wl820 The test cases pass... I haven't tested

Here it is finally: The MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions.

The first keynote speech was by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy, and by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brain behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution – what I alluded to in my first post regarding this conference – the ways in which MySQL has grown, evolved, scaled and continues to make new inroads into new applications and industries.

From Peter: “What is most important hasn’t changed – MySQL is still a great piece of technology and it is evolving very rapidly.” (Love that quote!) Also “MySQL is also buzzword compatible: NoSQL, BigData.”

From Baron: He talked about his own personal journey from closed-source, proprietory to open-source, and the …

Wow! A lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007.

MySQL has been acquired twice: once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has changed — we were talking about new features in MySQL 5.1, which wasn’t released yet, along with Falcon (where did it go?). 5.1 has long since been released as has 5.5, and we’re now talking about 5.6 instead of 6.0. There was no “Cloud” on the horizon, nor was there MariaDB, XtraDB, Drizzle, Schooner, or any of the other offshoots of MySQL, all of which are creating a new buzz around the product.

Yet, one thing remains constant: the vibrant community around MySQL. In spite of all the changes in technology, ownership, versions, …

Now that the snow is melting and spring is in the air, the SkySQL Team is hitting the road and making the rounds of key industry events, trade shows, and meetups around the globe.  Come meet the team, pick-up a few tips and tricks for using the MySQL database, network with your peers, and learn more about SkySQL’s products and services.  Here are some the events we’ll be at this spring:

BIG Data, A New Horizon for Data Analysis
March 20 - 21, 2012
Cité Internationale Univeritaire de Paris, Paris, France

POSSCON 2012
March 28-29, 2012
Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, Columbia, South Carolina

…

The new dashboard from the CloudStack 3.0 beta.

Over the last year I have been working on the CloudStack Open Source Cloud Computing project. This month we are getting ready to launch CloudStack 3.0 which really raises the bar for cloud computing platforms.  So what is CloudStack ? short It is an infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS) platform that orchestrates virtualized servers into an elastic compute environment. The project was originally developed by Cloud.com and is now sponsored by Citrix since they acquired Cloud.com in July of 2011.

CloudStack provides multiple methods for interacting with the …

In my day job at SkySQL I work with Drupal as our content management system.  One thing we often need to do is provide a way for people to sign up for events and the like.  One such event is the upcoming SkySQL and MariaDB: Solutions Day for the MySQL® Database and unlike other events we needed to take into account the dietary requirements of those wishing to attend.

For events registration we use the Signup module and use a theme template function to provide a set of standard fields.  The code looks something like this:

function ourtheme_signup_user_form($node) {
  $form = array();
  // If this function is providing any extra fields at all, the following
  // line is …

Dear Kettle fans,

Today I’m really excited to be able to announce a few really important changes to the Pentaho Data Integration landscape. To me, the changes that are being announced today compare favorably to reaching Kettle version 1.0 some 9 years ago, or reaching version 2.0 with plugin support or even open sourcing Kettle itself…

First of all…

Pentaho is again open sourcing an important piece of software.  Today we’re bringing all big data related software to you as open source software.  This includes all currently available capabilities to access HDFS, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, the specific VFS drivers we created as well as the ability to execute work inside of Hadoop (MapReduce), Amazon EMR, Pig and so on.

This …

Linux.conf.au this year kicks off next week in Ballarat, just down the road from me.  I'll be there and even have a speaking gig, not in the main conference but in the HA and Distributed Storage mini-conf before the main event.

I'll be talking about MySQL®, the companies that now exist to support it, and the third party products that are starting to proliferate in what appears to be a community effort to address perceived shortcomings in the Oracle offerings.  Many of these offerings are in the HA space, and there have been some pretty amazing developments recently.

So if you want to find some history of Oracle's effect on MySQL's …