Geo-referencing IPs is, in a nutshell, converting an IP address, perhaps from an incoming web visitor, a log file, a data file, or some other place, into the name of some entity owning that IP address. There are a lot of reasons you may want to geo-reference IP addresses to country, city, etc., such as in simple ad targeting systems, geographic load balancing, web analytics, and many more applications.

This is a very common task, but I have never actually seen it done efficiently in MySQL in the wild. There is a lot of questionable advice on forums, blogs, and other sites out there on this topic. After working with a Proven Scaling customer, I recently did some thinking and some performance testing on this problem, so I thought I would publish some hard data and advice for everyone.

…

Marten Mickos emailed to point out the MySQL Workbench offering (a good FAQ here). As I've said before, MySQL gets it. Why? Well, in the eyes of commercial enterprise software vendors, the optimal result is for OSS vendors to stick to their "OSS religious" roots. An incredibly low % of OSS users end up paying for the software/subscription. This means that OSS Vendor A doesn't have the financial resources to close the feature/function gap vs. Enterprise Vendor B. That?s why growing an OSS business beyond $100M is more difficult than getting to $100M. Yes, OSS is already competing with enterprise... READ MORE

As a follow up to my post about Cesar Cerrudo's new whitepaper, earlier this month David Litchfield talked about putting honeypots in the database in his blog post, Database tripwires..., to catch someone snooping around. The basic idea for non-Oracle databases is to create some sort of alerting function (such as one that fires an email) that gets called by a view with an interesting sounding name or interesting sounding column names. Triggers could work for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE, if the attacker is attempting to alter data. However, if the attacker is simply collecting information, then triggers aren't effective because triggers can't be defined on SELECT operations. This is why he …

(Jumbo) Maple Cream Pie

(Credit: Matt Asay)

In thinking a bit more about my post on MySQL's Workbench product, it's starting to sound to me like a matter of pie. Let me explain.

MySQL isn't really holding back any functionality with Workbench. Not the essential functionality that its users need. It's just holding back some time-saving features from a tool that is otherwise fully functional and enables the same output that its open-source version enables. You pay to get to the end result faster, but you can get the same end result with the open-source version.

MySQL writes:

Everything that is possible in the Standard Edition (commercial version) can also be done with the OSS Edition. You only trade saving time and ease of use for money.... …

(Credit: MySQL)

MySQL, one of the world's most successful open-source companies, has released the Standard Edition of its new MySQL Workbench product under a proprietary license. The company gives several reasons for doing so, but I suspect the core reason is that MySQL is experimenting with ways to ensure more of its production customers pay it for the value they derive from its products.

Is this the future of open source? To get ubiquity through open source and then cash through proprietary source?

I emailed Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, about the change and he stressed what MySQL's FAQ already notes: This is not crippleware:

...

The 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, making its second appearance on Sheeri Kritzer Cabral’s blog, The MySQL She-BA. Eddie Awad is on-deck for LB#73. After him, there’s lots of room, so please send an email to the Log Buffer coordinator (me) if you’d like to edit and publish an [...]

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.

On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350.

Mark …

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.
On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350. …

Cesar Cerrudo of Argeniss Information Security has put out a new whitepaper (.pdf format), Data0: Next generation malware for stealing databases, describing how malware could be crafted to steal information out of databases. For the most part, it stays at a high-level, however, Cesar does give a few example queries (for SQL Server), the appropriate API calls to perform certain operations, etc., which delve a bit more into the technical side, but even these are fairly straight-forward. To demonstrate what he talks about in the whitepaper, he built a simple proof of concept (PoC), but based on what's in the whitepaper (and what is generally accepted as what's possible), nothing seemed outlandish or hard-to-do. Just for those worried about that PoC being …

Marten Mickos once (mildly) complained about the Open Source Business Conference, suggesting that it was good for vendors but needed more customers. I heard the same thing from Red Hat and other would-be sponsors. Back then, of course, the market wasn't buying as much open source as it was selling.

My what a difference three years makes. Last year we had attendees from MIT, Christian Science Monitor, AllianceBernstein, E*Trade, H&R Block, Sony, Boise Cascade, and many others. This year that IT contingent keeps swelling.

I'm starting to get really excited about the upcoming OSBC. The website doesn't yet show it, but we're quickly pulling together the best assemblage of open-source firepower on the planet. It turns out that there are a lot of people qualified to speak on the topic of "Putting Open Source to Work," OSBC 2008's theme.

Here are a few of the …