One of the issues Web Developers face is making their application robust to prevent SQL injection attacks. Different approaches exist which help. Sometimes people use large abstraction layers (which, sometimes, don't make anything safe ...) and sometimes people use prepared statements as a way to secure queries. Now prepared statements were a nice invention some 30 years ago abut they weren't meant for making things secure and so they do have some shortcomings: One issue is that preparing and executing a query adds a round-trip to the server where it then requires resources. In a classic application this is no issue. The users starts the application up early in the morning and processes data multiple times so the prepared statement handle is re-used quite some time. The system benefits from early optimisations.  In a typical PHP Web application this isn't the case. A request and therefore a database connection with its associated …

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.04 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available

There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here on out. Shard-Query is very flexible in it’s configuration, so you can use this sample database to spread processing over up to 20 nodes.

The Infobright Community Edition (ICE) images are available in 32 and 64 bit varieties. Due to memory requirements, the InnoDB versions are only available on 64 bit instances. MySQL will fail to start on a micro instance, simply decrease the values in the /etc/my.cnf file if you really want to try micro instances.

*EDIT*
The storage worker currently logs too much …

Last week I spoke at and attended the first ever PHP Community Conference. It was very good. It was also very different from my normal conference. I usually go for very technical stuff. I don't often stop and smell the roses of the community or history of my chosen (by me or it I am not sure sometimes) profession. There was a lot of community at this one.

One thing that seemed to be a hot topic at the conference was frameworks. CakeDC, the money behind CakePHP was the platinum sponsor. I chatted with Larry Masters the owner of CakeDC for a bit while walking one night. Great guy. Joël Perras gave a tutorial about Lithum. I …

Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on a Debian Squeeze server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

This week there are two big events for the MySQL community: The O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Oracle Collaborate run by the IOUG. At these events our Engineering VP, Tomas Ulin, announced the latest milestone releases for our main products. MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.1 as well as our new Windows Installer. There's lots of cool stuff in there but one feature really excited me: MySQL 5.6 contains a memcache interface for accessing InnoDB tables. This means you can access data stored in MySQL not only using SQL statements but also by using a well established and known noSQL protocol.

This works by having the memcache daemon running as plugin as part of the MySQL server. This daemon can then be configured in three ways: Either

• to do what memcached always …

Groklaw declares victory. Cloudera updates Hadoop distro. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Groklaw claimed victory, will stop publishing new articles on May 16.

# Cloudera released version 3 of its Hadoop distribution.

# VoltDB released version 1.3 of its open source distributed in-memory database.

# Black Duck grew sales by 51% in Q1.

# eXo and Convertigo …

Last week I presented on the super cool PECL/mysqlnd_ms PHP extension at the Minnesota PHP User Group. In short, mysqlmd_ms will provide some transparency for PHP web applications to interact with master and slave MySQL database setups.

Here’s my slide deck:

Intro to PECL/mysqlnd_ms (4/7/2011)

There’s a couple things mysqlnd_ms needs to support before I can use it such as support for single master (i.e. local dev) environments and detection of “dead” MySQL servers so traffic isn’t passed to them over and over again.

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.4 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 11.4 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

We have had several users report issues with libdrizzle lately, but on closer inspection it has been found they are using an old version with known problems.

Back in October we merged libdrizzle into the main drizzle trunk.  All libdrizzle development since then has happened in drizzle rather than the separate libdrizzle project.  We had intended to shut down the libdrizzle project page but for several reasons it had not happened.  The libdrizzle project page now has a message to state that you should use drizzle instead and we have pulled the downloads down.  In the next few weeks we intend to:

1. 
   
2. kill the libdrizzle project page completely
   
3. devise a way to compile just libdrizzle when using the drizzle trunk, omitting the need to have …