The fourth in a series of five abstracts for the O’Reilly MySQL Conference in April 2008.

Learn how to audit your systems, and run through the right checklists so you can sleep better at night knowing your systems are more secure.

Security is on everyone?s radar these days. You may be wondering yourself whether your database systems are really as secure as they should be. We?ll discuss some of the latest vulnerabilities, and what you can do to protect your systems.

1. Introduction
2. Authentication
3. SQL Injection
4. OS Security
5. Network Security
6. Conclusions

This is the third in a series of five abstracts submitted to the O’Reilly MySQL Conference in April 2008.

MySQL has a great facility for creating a read-only failover database. We’ll show you how to setup, start, failover, and monitor it.

Setting up MySQL to have a master + slave failover capability might be intimidating, but it needn’t be.

1. Intro
2. Anatomy of MySQL Replication
3. Initial Master copy
4. Setup + starting the slave
5. Failover from Master
6. Adding another slave
7. Monitoring your slave db
8. Conclusions

The second in a series of five abstracts for the O’Reilly MySQL Conference in April 2008.

Inevitably hackers are trying to get at your data, so you mine as well know what they can and can’t do. What better way to discover where you’re vulnerable than hacking your own systems.

Operating Systems have bugs, Database Software has bugs, and so does your application, probably. A better question is how hackable are you? We?ll look at some of the nefarious ways intruders can get in, so you?ll better know how secure your systems really are.

1. Intro
2. OS level
3. Database level
4. Application level
5. Conclusions

According to my findings in Bug #31876, MySQL does not commit data to disk in Windows using the same method MS SQL Server and DB/2 are using. The method MySQL uses appears to be seven times slower in pathological scenarios.

The bug report contains a patch - thanks to the MySQL WTF (The Windows Task Force) and the lab provided by the customer for helping me to find that.

Does this work for you? I want to hear about your test results.

Since few days ago I had no problem to perform my data backups using mysqlhotcopy.
Tonight I had an astonishing problem:

Invalid db.table name 'archivio.archivio`.`almanacco' at /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy line 859
Invalid db.table name 'banner.banner`.`adv' at /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy line 859

… and so on … for every database to backup.

It’s very strange that the db_name the script needs to access is ‘archivio.archivio’. There’s a duplication of the db name, I have a db named ‘archivio’ not ‘archivio.archivio’.

So, what’s the problem?
I didn’t change mysqlhotcopy during last few months, but I updated my ubuntu just few days ago and the new DBD version is 4.0004 instead of older 2.9xxx.
Newer versions of DBD::mysql seem to prefix the table names with the database name causing mysqlhotcopy to fail. This seems to happen after version 4.0003

Now I have just two solutions: …

A little while ago I offered to take time off work and improve MySQL Table Sync. I've gotten a very positive response to that, with several organizations offering to contribute to the bounty, so I'll go ahead and commit to doing this. Read on for the details.

Some time ago I was looking for a password vault and came across some recommendations for KeePass. KeePass is open source and free. It's a nice password manager and some of the features I like are:

• Strong encryption of the password database
• The ability to use a password, key file, or the combination of the two to secure access to said password database
• A password generator with a multitude of options
• The ability to copy the password to the clipboard (without ever showing it) and have it clear the password after a set amount of time
• Organize password entries by groups and subgroups (think folders)

A new version, 1.09, released in October. There is also a …

Marten Mickos has summarized his rules for how to disrupt an industry. This is advice worth heeding, especially when you consider that many of the companies recently acquired (or invested in) at outsized valuations (Zimbra, Blue Lithium, SurfControl, Hyperion, TellMe, Fotolog, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) have one core thing in common:

MySQL.

Marten's first rule for disruptors is also perhaps the most important: Follow no model.

There used to be a well-worn path to software success: build a proprietary product, sell a perpetual license, make service contracts imperative, and release a new version every few years in what amounted to a "mandatory" upgrade. This model worked for more than two decades.

What changed? ...

I submitted proposals for the MySQL Conference & Expo.SQL AntiPatterns III thought it would be a no-brainer to do a sequel of my 2007 talk, "SQL AntiPatterns". That talk was very well attended, thanks to Jay Pipes' endorsement in his guide to the conference. It's not hard to come up with all-new content for a sequel!Topics in this presentation:* Corrupt your data by storing images in files