If you are security conscious and nowadays who isn’t?, you may have pondered over ways to make your external SSH connection safer.
Of course there’s always One-time Passwords and Public Keys, but if like me you watch the daily barrage of brute force attacks you may be thinking it’s only a matter of time…

That’s what I was thinking at about the same time an SMS arrived on my mobile….then it hit me….I take my mobile everywhere, if only my server could call me and ask if it is really me trying to log in.

My first instinct was to try and insert a Perl or Python script into the login process. After all …

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies …

I want a new command in MySQL/InnoDB to freeze all filesystem activity in InnoDB… until I unfreeze it?

Why? I want mysqlhotcopy semantics for InnoDB.

Right now you can run FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK and then xfs_freeze but it’s not very efficient or easy to code, and it’s pretty fragile.

INNODB FREEZE should not require a connection to remain open and should require an INNODB UNFREEZE to return IO to its normal state.

Further, when you copy away an underlying InnoDB database to a new server, crash recovery should NOT be required.

What really bothers me about the recent desire for MySQL features (triggers, etc) is that these type of features mean a LOT more to me. Operational competence in MySQL is very important and it seem the MySQL developers often forge this…

Drizzle and the InnoDB plugin are starting to show the way though….

Update:

I …

I had a sad time this year when I missed the MySQL conference, since I had much fun last year in Santa Clara. I can’t miss it next year.

As a MySQL partner, and after almost 2 years doing MySQL training, I sure have interesting things to tell in the conference, but I’m not sure about what.

I will be thinking about this in the next weeks, but I’d appreciate some help. What topics are you interested in?

Well, I have started formatting the results from the survey. This will take a little while as the survey software doesn't make it easy to download and clean it up (without paying for a subscription). As soon as the data is cleaned up I will post the entire data set and a link for everyone to download.

However, while I work on the data, I will provide some summary results. Here is a list of countries who had respondents. If a country is not listed, it had 0 responses/

Wondering how interested people would be in this topic for MySQL Users Conference next year?

I must admit, I was very surprised to read rumors of Monty quitting Sun. I haven't heard from him personally but if true I think it is sad but a decision that he has thoroughly thought about since Sun's acquisition of MySQL earlier this year.I expect him to stay longer though: Perhaps mostly because when I chatted with him a couple of months ago, I had the impression that he intended to stay at

While evaluating LuaSQL as backend connection replacement I came across this. I did a quick performance test using mysqlslap and it showed that just reading and copying the result can be significantly faster with LuaSQL.

Benchmark details

What I did was just sending the query to the backend and building up a new result-set in LUA.

This is the code for LuaSQL:

require("luasql.mysql")
local _sqlEnv = assert(luasql.mysql())
local _con = nil

function read_auth(auth)
    local host, port = string.match(proxy.backends[1].address, "(.*):(.*)")
    – We explicitly connect to db "test" since mysqlslap …

I am giving two lightning talks at Open Source Days on October 3-4. One on improving database I/O performance using clustered indexes with MySQL/InnoDB, and one on advanced profiling with OProfile.

Hope to meet up with a lot of people there!

This week I'm changing gears of my life. On Friday (5th September), I  yodeled and bled purple for one last time. It has been 2 years and 8 months when I first joined Yahoo! directly from college during which the size of Yahoo!, here at Bangalore, has almost tripled. Definitely the most rewarding and learning time for me as I worked and interacted with some really cool, supportive and intelligent people.

It was really a difficult decision to consider as I had no reasons to leave. It took me some time to convince myself. The only reason probably is that I got an opportunity to do something that always wanted to, that is working for a startup :).

Starting Monday I'm joining mKhoj, an Indian startup in the "Mobile Advertising marketplace" here at Bangalore. Looks like exciting times ahead.

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