The slides for today's presentation at Shmoocon are here:

http://technocation.org/files/doc/2008_02_SecuringDBs.pdf

Just a note so folks at the conference can download them whenever they want. Folks not at the conference can, too but the slides don't give away the whole talk so I don't know how useful they're going to be.....

I’m reading the guide, but I’m still too busy with my work to read it proficiently. In order to pass the exam I have to read it again focusing all the details.

But, after reading the first 6 chapters (more then 50% of the entire book) I found the guide useful and simply understandable … and, thanks to lulu.com, it seems to me to be cheapest.
Well done authors!!!

This integrates with Monolith, but the database update function can be stripped out for use without Monolith. The idea is that this script is a wrapper for mysqldump that does backup file consistency checking, email reporting, file based logging and directory pruning.

I used to have one script for daily, weekly, and monthly all running out of /etc/cron.daily /etc/cron.weekly /etc/cron.monthly - respectively. But maintaining 3 scripts is foolish if one can do everything. So I added some variables to check day of week and day of month to achieve this.

Enjoy the code. Script Link here.

Some people might have noticed that Workbench runs very slowly and flickers a lot in their machines. Other people will be able to work without noticing any significant sluggishness with the diagram graphics. The difference is because Workbench’s custom canvas may use hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics or non-accelerated software rendering, depending on the system (ie, whether or not a 3D accelerated graphics card is available or not). We were expecting that the most reasonably recent machines (maybe 5 years old or less) would have at least some basic graphics acceleration, but for some reason, that seems to not always be the case. Apparently, some people that have decent systems with ATI or Intel cards seem to get the fallback software rendered canvas, which will result in sluggish graphics.

We are still not sure why Cairo/Glitz (the underlying graphics library used by our drawing …

Just read about the potential performance implications of having thousands of tables in a single MySQL database over at Ask Bjørn Hansen’s blog.

We have that type of setup at Alert Logic, but I don’t remember any problems while shutting down the database server. I wonder if the FLUSH TABLES problem only happens that badly under MyISAM instead of InnoDB?