About half a year have passed since me and Vadim have left MySQL to do MySQL Consulting on our own. Bunch of people have been wondering about our experiences so I thought it would be worth to share it here.

Feels Good. I always liked to be my own boss and funny enough I always was very independent in my professional life. In SpyLOG I was second person in the company and completely managed technical department, later in MySQL I still kept a lot of independence with my boss Tom Basil supporting my creativity rather than forcing me to do stuff. This started to gradually change in Corporate MySQL thought. Now I'm finally my own boss without limits. I can do what makes sense for me both in technical and business areas. It feels great.

Feels Scary Sometimes it felt a bit …

The February Boston MySQL User Group meeting was great! I spoke about MySQL security; you can now download the slides and the video. I continue to be impressed with the sound quality of the video camera I have, I was pretty good about repeating the question folks asked, but you can clearly hear it in the audio (well, I could when I was wearing headphones, but I also have pretty bad hearing).

Special thanks to http://technocation.org for hosting the bandwidth for the videos.

Topics covered in the talk:
ACLs
Test dbs & anonymous accounts
OS files and permissions
Application data flow
SQL Injection
XSS (Cross-site scripting)

PDF of slides (1.4M):
http://www.sheeri.com/presentations/MySQLSecurity2007_02_08.pdf

Slides …

I’m happy to now announce the full Quality Contribution program tentatively described in December.

Some basics: We understand that the main reason users report bugs is to get them fixed. That said, we still think we have plenty of opportunities of improving our ways when it comes to making it easier for you to help us.

The Quality Contribution Program goal is to improve the quality of MySQL products, with the active co-operation of the MySQL user community. The program facilitates this by

1. visibly acknowledging the participants by attributing individual quality enhancements to them;
2. rewarding the participants with benefits in proportion to their contribution (Awards are subscriptions to MySQL Enterprise); …

So I am not much of a C hacker .. I never really got into pointers and stuff like that. PHP is so nice and easy. However I still want to give back to C based OSS projects I care about. A while ago I setup a wiki to track todo items for up coming PHP releases and other release related information. The page sees varying activity, but I think its helped Ilia a little bit for his 5.x releases. Its not that relevant for Derick's work on the 4.4.x branch, as that one is about bug fixing and not feature additions. Where I am really hoping it will make a big impact is with PHP 6. I am hoping that the list of todo items will assist in making sure that the next major version of PHP is all around …

I just posted part three of the Falcon article series that’s currently running on the MySQL Dev/Community zone. If you wondered about table support in Falcon, or how the new engine’s indexes differ from traditional B-Tree and Clustered indexes, or how to backup and migrate to Falcon, check out the article as it should have the answers you need. Part one and two of the articles are also available if you haven’t read them yet.

Regarding Falcon releases, we’ll be putting out a new Alpha releases each month on the march to the first Beta, which we’re targeting for late Q2 this year. Quite a number of …

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Three months ago, I wrote about a procedure to create MySQL FEDERATED tables.

I just added a quick fix that should make the procedure less susceptible to issues relating to bug #23856. To do that, I had to remove the ORDER BY ordinal_position bits in all the calls to GROUP_CONCAT over the rows in the information_schema.COLUMNS table.

If you include the ORDER BY ordinal_position clause, the concatenation result will mess up sometimes. The behaviour can be attenuated somewhat by decreasing value for the group_concat_max_len server variable, but so far, I have not seen a sufficiently …

What happened to the MySQL Winter of Code? Are they waiting for winter in Australia?

I live near Boston, MA and I can tell you it’s definitely winter in the northern hemisphere….

So what are we waiting for?

Well, I can say this — we’re waiting for people. The Winter of Code idea is a great one, particularly since if MySQL works with academic institutions they could help students find Master’s Projects or part of Ph.D. work. Imagine someone writing a new storage engine and having that earn them a Master’s degree. This is exactly what MySQL needs — more people who understand database internals and best theoretical practices to start coding and see where it goes. Note the “more people” — they already have staff that does this.

I’m guessing the Winter of Code is nonexistent because of other big announcements that have been happening; still, I would love to see some collaboration with …

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/07/18/multivalued_datatypes_access/

This is an interesting read — it would be awesome if MySQL just used the “SET” or “ENUM” data types to be a placeholder for a join table, that it would create automatically for you. Of course, that’s a new level of functionality — MySQL does not implicitly create permanent tables with any commands. But it would be neat.

Thanx to Rich McIver for passing along this link:

http://www.businessintelligencelowdown.com/2007/02/top_10_largest_.html

I’m amused mostly because the article interchanges “database” with “data storage” — many of the sites have “digital documents” included in their count, and YouTube is in there completely with the amount of space their videos take up. But is all this stuff stored in databases? I do not think so. Anyone know for sure?