I‘ll be at the MySQL meetup tonight, as will many others. If you‘re interested in meeting some MySQL users and developers in the Chicago area, please drop by!

More information is at http://mysql.meetup.com/5/

I'll be at the MySQL meetup tonight, as will many others. If you're interested in meeting some MySQL users and developers in the Chicago area, please drop by!

More information is at http://mysql.meetup.com/5/

I‘ll be at the MySQL meetup tonight, as will many others. If you‘re interested in meeting some MySQL users and developers in the Chicago area, please drop by!

More information is at http://mysql.meetup.com/5/

I took a little break over the Christmas period and avoided using the computer as much as possible, so this is my first blog of the year. I mentioned AJAX in my last blog and in the time since then my demo was completed (after a few teething problems). I gave a demo to my boss and a couple of clients on Friday and it went down really well, it's often difficult with clients as people are so used to computers these days people have a certain level of expectation and while us as technical people can see the benefits of something like AJAX it's often lost in translation somewhere along the line. Thankfully in this case they were really keen and we are in the process of setting up a test to see if it improves the clients business.

Last week I recieved my iPod Nano, the prize from the MySQL 5.0 competition. It had been a while in coming due to me not being home when the delivery company called before Christmas. It's small, very small but …

This time, it really took us ages to get our newest XAMPP version out. Although we started up with BETA testing in November, new releases of MySQL, PHP, Apache, and phpMyAdmin kept drawing the phase out. But we did it and can now present you with a brand new XAMPP release.

New in this version of XAMPP: Apache (2.2.0), MySQL (5.0.18), PHP (5.1.1) and phpMyAdmin (2.7.0-pl1).

Last time, we didn't offer an update package, and there won't be any this time, either. It isn't really possible to automate an upgrade from Apache 2.0 to Apache 2.2, and we'd like to avoid anyone messing up their server. So if you'd like to update to the new Apache version, you'll need to install a new version of XAMPP and migrate your data manually.

Download XAMPP for Windows
…

This time, it really took us ages to get our newest XAMPP version out. Although we started up with BETA testing in November, new releases of MySQL, PHP, Apache, and phpMyAdmin kept drawing the phase out. But we did it and can now present you with a brand new XAMPP release.

New in this version of XAMPP: Apache (2.2.0), MySQL (5.0.18), PHP (5.1.1) and phpMyAdmin (2.7.0-pl1).

Last time, we didn't offer an update package, and there won't be any this time, either. It isn't really possible to automate an upgrade from Apache 2.0 to Apache 2.2, and we'd like to avoid anyone messing up their server. So if you'd like to update to the new Apache version, you'll need to install a new version of XAMPP and migrate your data manually.

Download XAMPP for Windows
…

MySQL AB has been added to the GSA contract, providing government customers the ability to conveniently purchase and deploy MySQL database solutions. More than 8 million active installations around the world employ MySQL, including thousands of federal, state, and local government organizations such as Los Alamos National Labs, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and the Department of Defense. A new whitepaper about MySQL's use in government applications is available at http://www.mysql.com/gov

Do you have a policy of strong passwords?
Do you want to enforce it? If yes, then you may want a quick way of checking if your users are abiding to the rules.
You can either force the users to change passwords through a smart application, to prevent them from using weak passwords, or, if you are assessing an existing environment, you can check the existing passwords against a dictionary, to see if there are some imeediately exploitable passwords among your server accounts.
The mechanics of passwords checkingChecking passwords against a dictionary is a costly business. It can be made more affordable if we manage to put all the items to check in the database itself, so that we can use the DBMS force to do our job.
What we have to do is to collect a large list of words that we would not like our users to set as their password. Immediate candidates are user names, both from the operating system and the database, user full names, …

I used to make backup dumps from my webhosting MySQL databases (I've got remote access) via the mysqldump command. All commands that I need (including mysqlcheck to optimize and analyze all tables) are grouped together in batch files, so it works very conveniently. One more word to mysqlcheck - you should optimize and analyze your tables from time to time to defragment the tables and renew the index statistics. That makes sure that performence doesn't suffer if many records are deleted and inserted.

However, after making new backup files today, I realized that the date/time data were one hour ahead of the original data. I was wondering how this could happen, analyzed the dump file and soon found the answer: the tz-utc option.

This option was by default set to true, so these lines were included in the dump file:

/*!40103 SET @OLD_TIME_ZONE=@@TIME_ZONE */;
/*!40103 SET TIME_ZONE='+00:00' */;
…

This time, it really took us ages to get our newest XAMPP version out. Although we started up with BETA testing in November, new releases of MySQL, PHP, Apache, and phpMyAdmin kept drawing the phase out. But we did it and can now present you with a brand new XAMPP release.

New in this version of XAMPP: Apache (2.2.0), MySQL (5.0.18), PHP (5.1.1) and phpMyAdmin (2.7.0-pl1).

Last time, we didn't offer an update package, and there won't be any this time, either. It isn't really possible to automate an upgrade from Apache 2.0 to Apache 2.2, and we'd like to avoid anyone messing up their server. So if you'd like to update to the new Apache version, you'll need to install a new version of XAMPP and migrate your data manually.

Download XAMPP for Windows Download XAMPP for …