ZCS 4.5 helps make admins' jobs easier -- a lot easier in some cases. This post discusses advanced search in the admin console, backup and restore in the admin console, backup performance improvements, and good policies for creating a recoverable system.

Advanced Search for Users, Domains, Servers
We've added an advanced search capability to the admin console. It includes a search builder similar to what has been available in the end user client. We had heard from many customers that they wanted to create complex searches, such as "show me all domains with xyz in them" or "show me all users on server 3" or "show me all users with last name xyz on server 5". You can construct all these searches and quite a few more now, and since the search uses LDAP indexes it's fast. This feature is AJAX helping admins.

Backup and Restore in the Admin Console
For the ZCS 4.5 Network Edition …

Wind River acquires Linux technology from FSMLabs…Novell releases an update to the open source Mono .NET framework…Opengear to support open source Nagios monitoring technology in its network appliances…and more…

Wind River Acquires Hard Real-Time Linux Technology from FSMLabs, Wind River Systems (Press Release)

Major Mono Milestone Significantly Eases Cross-platform Development, Novell (Press Release)

Embedded Nagios Appliances Provide Remote Monitoring and Remote Management, Opengear (Press Release)

Krugle Offers Code Search for the Microsoft Community, Krugle (Press Release)

So, OSDC 2007 (Open Source Developers Conference), held in Melbourne in previous years, will visit glorious sunny Brisbane this year (end November, early December).

My thanks to Anthony Towns, Andrae Muys and James Iseppi for helping me with the legwork and homework to put together our submission, and to the OSDC committee for giving us this opportunity - it'll be good.
More news (including the exact dates and venue) soon, Andrae is already preparing the Call for Papers.

If you are interested in helping and haven't written to me before, now is a good time.
Likewise, if you would like to sponsor this event, getting in early could get you an honourable mention even as early as the call for papers... that would get you nearly 10 months worth of exposure and good karma!
We actually received quite a few expressions of interest for sponsoring already; we'll be attaching sponsorships to specific …

Pentaho, one of our partners in open source Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence will be presenting several sessions at the upcoming MySQL Conference April 23-26 in Santa Clara.  Conference Early Registration ends March 14, so why wait?

Pentaho has also announced the General Availability of Pentaho Data Integration version 2.4 with open source ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) capabilities.

• Pentaho: …

We were having issues with mysql threads where they would be in sleep mode and wouldn’t die off for long time. At the same time we started having issues with our servers where the load will spike and eventually server will come to halt unless we killed all the apache processes and restarted apache [...]

MySQL AB today announced the formation of a new Telecom sales and business unit to meet the growing demand for its high-availability real-time database solutions in the converging telecom industry. The company also announced the availability of a new version of its MySQL Cluster product, especially designed and certified for use in carrier grade telecom environments, such as such as network subscriber databases (HLR, HSS) and Service Delivery Platforms (SDP).

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 …