This is my second article on how to build a role-based access control system in SQL. In the first article I gave a high-level overview of access control systems in general, especially in the web-application context, and talked about how some are implemented. I introduced the problems I designed my system to solve, and gave a roadmap for where this series of articles will end. I finished that article with a sketch of some basics to provide row-level read, write, and delete access control.

This article picks up where I left off. I want to revisit some things I swept under the rug in the first article, because I didn't want to throw all the complexity in at once. I'll explain my current system's full functionality, which includes roles, type checking, table-level and set-level privileges, and more. I will show you the design in great detail, and give working examples and ready-to-run SQL queries. I'll also explore ideas for extending or …

Just came across a good article by Jay Pipes talking about lazy loading and caching of content. A nice read with some good code examples that I thought I should share with my fellow readers.

Read Jays blog entry

Charles Babcock over at InformationWeek has written a great cover story on "The Greatest Software Ever Written."  It's a bit like the articles in Rolling Stone on the "Top 10 Albums" of all times; the choices obviously reflect the experiences and preferences of the author.  So while I don't agree with all of his selections (Robert Morris' worm?) for the most part I think his logic is well founded and he has highlighted some amazing software. 

I won't give away his list (just read the article) but I will offer a "Top 10" list of my own.  This is completely subjective and I've precluded software that was developed when I was still in short pants.  So without further …

Did you know you can change some Linux mount options at runtime? You can and it works just fine.

mount -o noatime,remount,rw /dev/hda3

Will do a live remount and just change the necessary options.

I specifically just did this to add noatime to benchmark the performance update.

You should theoretically be able to do this on a live and production machine but I'd recommend doing this with the machine out of service, all daemons shutdown, and the filesystem sync'd.

Where was I when the folks at Solid announced the beta release of solidDB for MySQL? Apparently it was announced at OSCON, where I wasn't, and it slipped through my sensors unnoticed.

Am excited to try it out. Falcon should also be coming shortly, right?

Update: I see that the most recent beta release announcement was in my aggregator. Missed that too.

It's not everyday I'm trying out Linux and certainly not since I switched to MacOSX on my workstations. I still have a big heart for Linux of course, but it's mostly when it comes for running it on some servers.

Today's Slashdot posting about Debian 4.0, dubbed Etch, releasing a Beta 3 got me curious. Curious enough to actually download the smallest iso with a network installation to try it out. I had to check whether my old Dell Inspiron 8000 would still spin its drive and although looking terrible ugly (oh my) compared to my PowerBook, it still made the exact annoying sound as before. So the hardware was working..



Same old, same old.. Not much changed on the default installation wizzard. Goes through everything, I'm choosing LVM for the first time since I have to check it out. After setting the wrong timezone (I did not care) I started to wait for the download of more than 600 packages.
…

Perhaps Linux has become so mainstream that a conference dedicated to it has become as superfluous as a conference on servers.  I was disappointed with LinuxWorld Boston earlier this year; no big announcements and traffic overall was light.  However, the program itself was quite strong with good keynotes and panel sessions.  Still, it had all the flavor of a regional conference.  Worth going to if you weren't going to make the trip to San Francisco. 

This week's LinuxWorld San Francisco, while certainly larger than the Boston event, seemed less interesting.  Aside from Lawrence Lessig, no really exciting keynotes or panels.  Novell had a big presence at the show, as did HP, but even Red Hat has pulled out of this event.  Perhaps LinuxWorld is played out. Or maybe I'm just sick of trade …

Slate posted an article today on "The CEO Bought a Yacht? Then it's
time to sell."
http://www.slate.com/id/2147788/?nav=tap3

A good quote from article:
"If you look at the recent record of CEOs who have become
yachtsmen, it's clear that when they buy a boat, it's the
shareholders who usually get soaked"

Computerworld is commenting on how this is not true for Oracle's Larry Ellison,
and I feel the need to share that this also not true with MySQL
Founder David Axmark.

Let me present the evidence, any guesses on who's boat is who's in
the photos?


…

In Semi-Dynamic Data, Sheeri writes about Semi-Dynamic Data and content pregeneration. In her article, she suggests that for rarely changing data it is often adviseable to precompute the result pages and store them as static content. Sheeri is right: Nothing beats static content, not for speed and neither for reliability. But pregenerated pages can be a waste of system ressources when the number of possible pages is very large, or if most of the pregenerated pages are never hit.

An intermediate scenario may be a statification system and some clever caching logic.

Statification is the process of putting your content generation code into a 404 page handler and have that handler generate requested content. The idea is that on a …

Trudy has posted to MySQL Forge the design that we are planning for pluggable authentication and authorization. Internally we are not working on this at the moment but we have had others ask what the roadmap is in terms of adding support for Roles, LDAP, and etc. The pluggable authentication system is a good project for someone who wants to learn the MySQL server's source code and it is a project that will enable additional projects.

Here is the link to the current design, feedback is welcome:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/PluggableAuthenticationSupport

If you are interested in what MySQL is planning, then you should keep an eye on MySQL Forge. We will be publishing more of our design docs in the future. At the moment we don't have a good way to make everything public in our project tracking tool, but we are working on making …