I was recently asked a question by someone who had attended my Shmoocon talk entitled “Why are Databases So Hard to Secure?”. PDF slides are available (1.34 Mb). I was going to put this into a more formal structure, but the conversational nature works really well. I would love to see comments [...]

I often get accused, especially by my European friends, of not being a true geek for two reasons: I don't carry an expensive camera with me at all times — nice Fisheye lens, Kaj! — and because I don't indulge in video games. Well, for all you Jay-ain't-a-true-geekers out there, I offer two photos today to prove my geekhood.

As some of you know, I live in Columbus, Ohio, with 2 dogs, 2 cats, and my lovely wife Julie. Last night, we got hammered with the most snow we've seen in March in over 40 years. By my estimation, there is about 18 inches of snow on the ground. The photo to the right was taken this morning, while the snow was still coming down, from my back door. You can see my garage and the ground covered in snow, but the most telling part of the photo is the amount of snow on the table on our back deck. …

No, its not alphabet soup. Just some notes from the session at the Sun Tech Days. I’ve not looked at DTrace much (my only look into instrumentation, has been from SystemTap, which doesn’t deal with applications), but plan on doing so soon… I’ve managed to get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 installed in VirtualBox, so it can only start being more fun from here…

Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, …

I learned something new about myisamchk. When doing a recovery of the data file, it creates not one but two temporary files. I knew about the TMD it creates in $datadir when rebuilding the MYD file but it creates a second temporary file using an old and rather annoying technique (which involves creating a file using the standard C ‘open()’ call, then deleting the file without closing the file descriptor.) I discovered this when myisamchk told me “Disk is full writing ‘/tmp/STQ3p9UF’ (Errcode: 28).” I looked in /tmp and didn’t see that file. So I did a

# lsof | grep delete

and low-and-behold, there it was. You know, as a sys admin, that really annoys me. I don’t care that it creates temporary files to do its thing. In fact, I expect it, but I at least want to know about it so I can plan accordingly. My /tmp partition only had 2.5 gigs of space and the table’s MYD was over 4 gigs in size. If I had known …

My employer, both MySQL and Sun, will reimburse me for my internet connection.

I wonder if I could just buy FON routers for my favorite cafes, and then expense them? It would let me have better and more reliable internet access then I get thru the crappy little wireless routers from Quest and Comcast...

One of the more interesting features of MySQL‘s JDBC driver is the fact that much of it the functionality it has it alterable or outright replacable by the end user without changing any of its code.

The network sockets can be replaced, the logging can be replaced, the usage advisor feature‘s reporting can be replaced, one can plug into connection lifecycle events (creation, destruction, autocommit state change, transaction boundaries, etc), and functionality can even be injected pre-query or post-query, all without changing a line of code in the driver itself.

I‘ll be showing how all of this works at the 2008 MySQL Conference. Some of the things I demonstrate will be for “fun“ (rewriting simple queries, supporting syntax other than SQL), other for “profit” (profiling, extrusion prevention, injecting bad behavior for system testing). …

I love this company!
MySQL is still a virtual company. The Sun acquisition hasn't change this very peculiar fact. Yesterday and the day before we have held IRC meetings between the MySQL community and some Sun open source big shots.

On Monday evening in Boston, there will be a more traditional user group meeting in Boston, host by Sheeri K. Cabral. Actually, not very much traditional. I mean, the real people will physically attend the meetup, but the whole meetup will be recorded, and you can participate via IRC. And, even better, I will make a guest appearance via video-conference.
So, please meet me in Boston …

On Monday, March 10th, Sun makes a stop in Boston on its world tour of “Mashup Meetups”. If you can’t make it in person, join us on the live ustream videocast at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oursql-the-mysql-database-videocast Currently there’s a promo for your viewing pleasure at (see “Video Clips”). I am very excited about this new videocast for the [...]

Yes, it has been a while since I added an entry in my blog. I have been working on creating a dynamic data warehouse system reliant on the traditional LAMP stack (and a very nifty graphical plug-in - please comment below if you wish to know what it is!).Firstly, I must make these qualifications before you read further:I consider Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball the pioneers of data warehousing; Data

Welcome the the 87th of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. First up, a couple of items responding to news about H-Store, the new database technology. Nigel Thomas of Preferisco wonders if H-Store is a new architectural era, or just a toy? Too much information, in turn, asks, Is H-Store the future of database [...]