Brian and Trudy have been busy entering design documents into the MySQL Forge wiki on a proposed pluggable authentication module system for MySQL, along with a related design document for pluggable authorization as well.

This discussion area and document is timely indeed. Over the last couple weeks, I have seen a number of mentions over on freenode #mysql about whether MySQL plans to support pluggable authentication modules, as well as recent ongoing discussion about the topic on the internals mailing list. The concept is one which I hinted about in "Pro MySQL" when I wrote about User Administration in Chapter 15, and the fact that it would be nice to have a role-based implementation similar to …

It's time to turn our attention to the sixth edition of Log Buffer, a Carnival of the Vanities for the DBA community.

This week, like every week, DBAs all around the world have been hard at work writing about their experiences, many of them providing detailed instructions on new and interesting ways to use and manage a database.

For folks wondering if it's worth all the work, Eddie Awad's Blog now has the latest results from his Unofficial Oracle Developer/DBA Salary Survey. The results are interesting, and hopefully encouraging. While the data is why we all rush there to see where we stand, there's also a good summary of the process Eddie went through to run and process the …

Slashdot has an excellent interview with Fedora Project Lead Max Spevack. It's great on a number of different levels, talking through the technical aspects of Fedora and what-not, but is particularly interesting when it hones in on the Fedora vs. RHEL question. Spevack responds to the contention that Fedora is simply beta-ware for RHEL, as follows:

I'm really glad this question was asked, because it gives me a chance to try to bust the NUMBER ONE MYTH about Fedora -- that Fedora is "just a beta for RHEL" or that "Fedora only exists to make Red Hat money" or "Red Hat doesn't care about Fedora, it's just a dumping ground for half-tested code". I hear all of those things from time to time, and *none* of them are true.

Let's back up for a moment -- the Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core split took place in 2003. And while I wasn't at Red Hat …

You may have noticed that you don't find any links for MySQL Administrator, MySQL QueryBrowser, MySQL MigrationToolkit and MySQL Workbench on dev.mysql.com anymore.

All these tools are now available in the new MySQL GUI Tools bundle and you can download versions for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

OK, it's official! Google has offered to host the first MySQL camp at its Mountain View headquarters, on November 10th through 12th. Many thanks go out to Googlers Leslie Hawthorn and Mikal Still, who made it happen. Google will be providing food for the event as well, but we still encourage creative contributions from other sponsors.

Some ideas for possible sponsors:

• Sponsor one or more developers to get to and from the unconference. Since the event is on the west coast, it is difficult for some developers to get to the conference, especially from the east coast and other countries. Consider offering travel expenses for interested and motivated parties
• Provide transportation to and from nearby airports via a shuttle service
• Books, t-shirts, etc for participants

…

Mike Kruckenberg has published the sixth edition of Log Buffer. Excellent post Mike, thanks! You can present your point of view of the database blogosphere by editing and publishing an edition of Log Buffer yourself. Learn how to on Log Buffer’s homepage. See you in a week!

mysqlsniffer v1.2 has been released which now supports MySQL 4.0 servers (via the --v40 command line option). Previously, it only supported 4.1+, but there are protocol differences between 4.0 and 4.1 that caused mysqlsniffer to crash often when sniffing 4.0 servers. The release works but it has not been tested extensively, therefore it is considered unstable. Thanks to Marek, though, for helping me try to get the release more stable.

By tim

In a conversation yesterday, John Fandel, the general manager of The O'Reilly Network, made an interesting point: he wants to build our web publishing tools around the model of delivering "dial tone."

As we talked, the idea took hold. I was reminded of Michael Crichton's observation in his 1983 book Electronic Life that in the 1940's there was concern that the telephone system was growing so fast that there wouldn't be enough operators unless AT&T hired every person in America. AT&T solved the problem by creating automated switching systems that, in effect, did turn every person in the world into an operator--without hiring them. The principle of dial tone is to create a situation where users can do something …

automation, database interface, metaprogramming software

Back at the MySQL Users Conference, I was talking to Monty about a good PHP* interface to MySQL that would go through a database, and make pages to be able to search, update and add new fields in the database. He mentioned Unireg, and I wrote it down, but only got to checking out what that was recently.

As far as I can tell from here, here, …

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 …