Software patents have been an agent of change in open source over the last decade, as I explained in my keynote at the 8th International Conference on Open Source Systems this week. Most notably, the astonishing proliferation of software patents has forced technology companies to spend a lot of time and energy assembling defensive portfolios.

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After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at …

If you’ve ever been troubleshooting on the MySQL command line and needed to quickly see how much memory is being used then you’ve probably noticed that there are no built in commands to give you this data. Unlike other enterprise databases MySQL doesn’t have a very robust management system built in to help make the DBA’s life easier. It doesn’t come with built in Stored Procedures to report on usage statistics or generate handy reports; so we have to code them and import them to MySQL — no relying on Oracle to help us out here.

So, here’s a stored procedure that can be imported to MySQL and run whenever you need to see the memory usage statistics. Installation and usage info is built into the SP below. The SP can also be downloaded from the repo: https://bitbucket.org/themattreid/generic-sql-scripts/src/15c75632f1af/mysql-memory-report-storedproc.sql

##################################################################### …

As Patrik noted last week, MariaDB is taking a leading role in the trend of keeping the MySQL ecosystem an open one. The SkySQL and MariaDB teams work together closely on this, and we even travel together!

Join both SkySQL and MariaDB at this week’s LinuxCon North America conference in sunny San Diego to learn more about how MariaDB is directly communicating with users (including SkySQL enterprise customers) to not only identify and help fix issues with current releases of the MySQL database, but to also further enhance MariaDB to become even more technologically advanced.

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I don't know why SELinux problems seem so frustrating. The problem almost certainly is related to the fact that there is frequently no error message. This is exactly the problem I ran into while turning up a new Apache web server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL6) with SELinux enabled.

Based on my last post MySQL LDAP Authentication Plugin, I received feedback from MySql Joro Blog by Oracle.

They told me:

Insted of writing (and having to deply) your own client plugin you probably can reuse the cleartext client side plugin, specially because it’s available in a number of mysql clients already. Check sql-common/client.c on MySQL 5.5+ for details.

This is very useful because you only need to put the plugin in server side, and in the client side you only need to check if the clear password plugin is enabled.

Now, I present the updated code with the only server side plugin, and I reused the cleartext client side plugin from MySql, it’s more short and very focused in LDAP authentication:

/*
Author: Ignacio Ocampo …

As a continuation of previous post, now, I will show how to make a mysql plugin for ldap authentication.

Get the mysql-server source code at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ (http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.5/mysql-5.5.27.tar.gz/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/)

Installing necessary packages

yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
yum install cmake ncurses-devel

Download source code, build and start MySQL Server

wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.5/mysql-5.5.27.tar.gz/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
tar -xzf mysql-5.5.27.tar.gz
cd mysql-5.5.25

# Preconfiguration setup
groupadd mysql
useradd -r -g mysql mysql

# Beginning of source-build specific instructions
cmake .
make
make install

# Postinstallation setup
chown -R mysql .
chgrp -R mysql .
./scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
chown -R root .
chown -R mysql data

cp support-files/mysql.server …

I have the goal of authenticate MySQL users with an LDAP server, currently, employees of my company are authenticated in several services (ftp, ssh, svn) through my LDAP server, except MySQL. (As you can imagine, I need to add manually every user in MySQL, a very tedious task).

In this post I only leave the example with LDAP authentication.

Installing necessary packages

yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
yum install openldap-devel

Source ldapClient.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include <ldap.h>
/* LDAP Server settings */
#define LDAP_SERVER "ldap://nafiux.com:389"
int
main( int argc, char **argv )
{
LDAP        *ld;
int        rc;
char        bind_dn[100];

/* Get username and password */
if( argc != 3 )
{
perror( "invalid args, required: username password" );
return( 1 );
}
sprintf( bind_dn, "cn=%s,ou=People,dc=nafiux,dc=com", argv[1] );
printf( "Connecting as %s...\n", …

I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

The problem many MySQL/MariaDB 5.5+ users are painfully aware of:

InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO
InnoDB: Warning: io_setup() failed with EAGAIN. Will make 5 attempts before giving up.
InnoDB: Warning: io_setup() attempt 1 failed.
InnoDB: Warning: io_setup() attempt 2 failed.
InnoDB: Warning: io_setup() attempt 3 failed.
InnoDB: Warning: io_setup() attempt 4 failed.
InnoDB: Warning: io_setup() attempt 5 failed.
InnoDB: Error: io_setup() failed with EAGAIN after 5 attempts.
InnoDB: You can disable Linux Native AIO by setting innodb_native_aio = off in my.cnf
InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M
InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
mysqld got signal 11 ;

There is no news that disabling InnoDB native AIO is not exactly the best possible option. It’s also not a secret that the alternative is increasing aio-max-nr if …