Scripting Python to connect to a MySQL database is fairly simple, even if you don’t have any much experience with Python.

You will need to have Python and MySQL installed. Once you have Python installed, you will need to import the MySQLdb and sys modules. For MySQL, you will simply need a user that has permissions to connect to the database and perform a select statement.

For this example, I am using Python v2.5, MySQL version 5.5.8., with Mac OS X 10.6.8.

Here are the links to download the files and applications necessary for this example script:
MySQL – http://dev.mysql.com/downloads
Python – www.python.org/getit/
MySQLdb module – …

Is your web environment secure? All of it?

Many people believe that if they’ve installed a network firewall, they’ve done their duty. They think that a firewall is like a strong barrier or moat protecting their information assets and that no more is needed. Wrong! Just as in times of old, tunnels can be dug under the moat, ladders can be used to scale the wall, and secret passageways can be found into the castle.

A web environment has four layers that need protection: the Network level, the Application level, the Operating System level and the Database level. Most people think of these layers as being one within the other, like concentric circles. They reason that if they protect the outermost level, the inner levels are automatically protected.

“That is simply not so!” explains David Maman, CTO of GreenSQL. “Hackers can attack a Web environment at each level independently, and security issues at each level need …

Following up on my previous blog about enabling SQL Access to CouchDB Views I thought I’d share what I think the single, biggest advantage is: The ability to connect, run of the mill, commodity BI tools to your big data system.

While the video below doesn’t show a PRPT it does show Pentaho doing Ad Hoc, drag and drop reporting on top of CouchDB with LucidDB in the middle, providing the connectivity and FULL SQL access to CouchDB. Once again, the overview:

BI Tools are commoditized; consider all the great alternatives available inexpensively (either in Open Source for free, Open Core, or even simply proprietary). Regardless of what solution you choose, these tools have fantastic, easy to …

A couple weeks back, I had the fortune of co-speaking at Percona Live NYC 2011 with Mark Uhrmacher, CTO of ideeli on the subject of running an E-commerce site with MySQL in the cloud. Interestingly, and a sign of the times, this was also the first time that I had ever met Mark, despite having worked for him for close to a year since I telecommute from home.

Here are the slides from that talk.

What I wanted attendees to get out of our talk was that you have to expect and plan for all sorts of failure situations when your database is in the cloud. Relative to conventional hosting or datacenters, things in the cloud break more frequently and in ways that are out of your control. AWS gives you the tools to plan and …

“Our experience from PNUTS also tells that these systems are hard to build: performance, but also scaleout, elasticity, failure handling, replication. You can’t afford to take any of these for granted when choosing a system. We wanted to find a way to call these out.” – Adam Silberstein and Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research. ___________________________________ A [...]

With the just released version 5.2.34 we also changed the python version used in MySQL Workbench (to 2.7). However, this produces a problem when upgrading from 5.2.33. The reason is that the installer leaves all the compiled python files (*.pyc) in the installation folder. On next load of Workbench you can’t even get beyond the splash screen.

We will soon publish a new release with that problem fixed. In the mean time simply uninstall Workbench before you install 5.2.34. Your stored connections, starters, settings etc. are not touched by this. Make sure that you remove any remaining file once uninstallation finished, before you install 5.2.34.

This problem was first encountered on Windows using the msi package, but might also affect the zip package or even other platforms. In any case remove the old files before installing 5.2.34.

MySQL 5.6.2 is available for your evaluation at Labs.MySQL.Com –

MySQL 5.6.2 ready to go

in three flavors — InnoDB-Memcached, New Performance Schema, or multi-threaded slave. Remember, these servers are for evaluation purposes and not for production. I downloaded the InnoDB-Memecached version on a Fedora system and the New Performance Schema on a Ubuntu system. Both downloads were the pre-built generic binaries.

Installation will be familiar to anyone who has installed the binary sever before and is covered in detail at Installing MySQL from Generic Binaries on Unix/Linux

shell> groupadd mysql
shell> useradd -r -g mysql mysql …

Last month was one of the busiest months for the InnoDB team:

• MySQL 5.6.2 milestone release with many InnoDB features
• MySQL Lab release of NoSQL to InnoDB with Memcached
• Three talks at O’Reilly MySQL Conference and COLLABORATE 11
• Ten blogs

The slides of the three talks are now available:

• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and Latest Enhancements, O’Reilly MySQL Conference, April 14, 2011, by Inaam Rana, John Russell
• InnoDB: Performance and Scalability Features, COLLABORATE 11, April 11, 2011, by Calvin Sun
• …

Oracle will shut down blogs.mysql.com/peterg in a few days. I don’t have an address for a new blog yet, but google in a few months for site:.ca peter gulutzan’s blog.

Warning — for testing purposes only!

At Collaborate and the O’Reilly MySQL Conferences, it was announced that Labs.MySQL.com host experimental builds of the MySQL server. These are NOT FOR PRODUCTIONYou can now try server binaries with features such as MySQL 5.6 with InnoDB with memcached daemon plugin, MySQL 7.2 Cluster with memached memcached daemon, MySQL 5.6 with the expanded performance schema tables, and MySQl 5.6 with multi-threaded slaves. These are very raw, unfinished products for testing only.

these binaries were created by MySQL testing servers.

They are NOT FIT FOR PRODUCTION!
They are provided solely for testing purposes, to try the latest bug fixes and generally to keep up with the development.

* Please, DO NOT USE THESE BINARIES IN PRODUCTION.
* Instead, install them on a …