Hi,

My name is Larry and I am an Oracle DBA. I work in the City for a large finance corporation - we use Oracle, SQLServer and Sybase. It's a great job, very well paid and plenty of opportunities to learn new stuff.

My company has been seriously hit by the crisis in the financial sector and the management is now wondering if it's really necessary to pay expensive licenses for every small project that requires a database. It's true that we have a corporate license agreement, but that does not cover all the instances - we need to distinguish between front end, back end, sockets, physical CPUs, cores, threads and lots of other rules I do not remember.

One of my managers heard about MySQL. He read that MySQL powers the majority of the Web 2.0 world. I thought that MySQL was only a small thing for home use, but maybe it's been improved. I am curious by nature, so I am really excited to discover something new. …

Josh Berkus' "Safe Data is Happy Data" (originally entitled "Lock Up Your Data") goes talks about defense in depth -- going beyond firewalls and other "perimeter defense" mechanisms such as middleware and web server tools. Berkus explains "full-stack security" including preventing SQL injection, data abstraction, database permissions, and even what to do after an attack.

Stream directly online at http://technocation.org/node/591/play or download the 346 Mb .wmv file at .

From the official OSCon description:

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Wow!. New MySQL Community release - MySQL 5.0.67 is just out which as manual says first community release since 5.0.51b. I just recently complained about community release irregularity and I'm glad to see the new release after all.

I only hope this will not be one time event but MySQL will follow its own promises of regular schedule of source and binary MySQL Community releases.

My even deeper hope, though, is MySQL will finally become rational and will stop walking their customers (users of MySQL Enterprise version) over mine field and allow community to check code changes first because of pushing them to the customers. MySQL Enterprise branch had enough serious problems which have been caught quickly by …

I have a lot of interaction with publishing types. I write a lot, and I edit some, and I do tech reviews and stuff for some publishers, and I co-authored a book, and I’ve worked on two magazines, and a newspaper, and I’m generally fascinated by the technical book market and stuff like that. I’m also someone who is lucky enough that his job is also his hobby. I work in technology, and am always doing something technology related at home in my spare time. Needless to say, I read tons upon tons of technical books.

I almost never post book reviews, in spite of the fact that I read all of these books. Why? Well, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you. It just hasn’t occurred to me to write a book review. Could be because I don’t really value book reviews too much myself I guess. I mean, if there’s a really obvious consensus across a huge number of reviews, I might be swayed. But in general, I find that book reviews are too often the …

After I moved back to Europe and Malta in order to set up our operations here, I was approached by a old friend of mine who wanted to know how to add a UNIQUE constraint and remove duplicates on a table, while keeping the newest records. He had been trying with ALTER TABLE but ran into problems as the older values were taken.

So, to help him out, I first solved it based on his original idea, and then figured I would post a small note about the solution here.

So, let’s say we have the following structure . . .

sql01 blogs> SHOW CREATE TABLE post1164\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: post1164
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `post1164` (
  `a` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `b` varchar(5) DEFAULT NULL,
  `c` varchar(5) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`a`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=7 …

Find out whether management at Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM think that open source is a threat or an opportunity. READ MORE

This includes the end of support for all things PHP 4 as noted by seemingly everybody on php planet. But I also wanted to reminds people that the same is more or less happening in the MySQL world too. Did you know that active support for MySQL 4.x ended along with the year 2006? Did you even know that MySQL 5.0 active support is ending this year!?! Given MySQL 5.1 no show mentality, they might have to review this. Well there is of course extended support that extends MySQL 4.0 support until this year, MySQL 4.1 until the end of next year and MySQl 5.0 until the end of 2011.

This includes the end of support for all things PHP 4 as noted by seemingly everybody on php planet. But I also wanted to reminds people that the same is more or less happening in the MySQL world too. Did you know that active support for MySQL 4.x ended along with the year 2006? Did you even know that MySQL 5.0 active support is ending this year!?! Given MySQL 5.1 no show mentality, they might have to review this. Well there is of course extended support that extends MySQL 4.0 support until this year, MySQL 4.1 until the end of next year and MySQl 5.0 until the end of 2011.

It’s time again for another edition of the weekly review of database blogs, Log Buffer. Since it was a big week for SQL Server, let’s start there, shall we?

The big news — SQL Server 2008 is released, as reported by SqlServer-qa.net, in seven different versions. Aaron Bertrand introduces a new kid on the block: SQL Server 2008 Web Edition — “. . . designed for highly available Internet …