From the Security threat report 2011 by Sophos, Page 46:

“Cybercrime is encroaching more and more into the business space. Industrial espionage, spearphishing of important employees to breach network boundaries and mass theft of customer information are more diffcult to detect and have very serious consequences. At the same time, network boundaries are becoming ever more indistinct and porous as new technologies enable greater access from remote workers and mobile devices. In addition, legal requirements place greater emphasis on traceability and compliance with predefned standards of data hygiene.

Increasing amounts of sensitive data is stored, accessed and manipulated in databases connected to company websites as businesses increasingly interact with their customers through the Internet. As a result, it’s become as easy to …

It’s always good to have some equations for reference when you are tuning a MySQL server. How else will you know what to set your buffer sizes to after all? If you have some that I’ve missed… add a comment!

Per-Thread Buffer memory utilization (read_buffer_size + read_rnd_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size + thread_stack + join_buffer_size + binlog_cache_size) * max_connections Global Buffer memory utilization innodb_buffer_pool_size + innodb_additional_mem_pool_size + innodb_log_buffer_size + key_buffer_size + query_cache_size Threads and Connections thread_cache miss rate = Threads_created / Connections connection ratio = (max_used_connections*100)/ max_connections threads_per_second = threads_created / uptime Key Buffer key_buffer_free = (key_blocks_unused * key_cache_block_size) / (key_buffer_size * 100) key_cache_miss_rate = key_read_requests / key_reads …

Sometimes you know for sure. And sometimes you wonder: Is this server part of a replication system? And, most specifically, is it an active slave?
The completeness of the answer depends on how much visibility you have on the server.
If you can ask the DBA, and possibly have access to the server data directory and configuration file, you can get a satisfactory answer. But if your access is limited to SQL access, things get a bit more complicated.
If you have the SUPER or REPLICATION_CLIENT privilege, then it's easy, at least in the surface.
SHOW SLAVE STATUS will tell you if the slave is running. An empty set means that the server was not configured as a slave.
The answer is not absolute, though. You need to read the output of SHOW SLAVE STATUS to understand if replication is under way.
For example, what is the difference between these two listings?

## listing 1 …

Usually I inform you here about MySQL related news in openSUSE. This time it will be a little bit different. But it will be still database related. You probably know that not so long ago (maybe still valid today), NoSQL databases were the cool thing to try. I think it has settled a bit now and it is no more about being cool, but more about your actual needs. So you may actually need some of these. And I can happily inform you, that thanks to the efforts of gladiac, we’ve got some of these in server:database repository now! Namely we’ve got MongoDB there and also Redis. Hurray! They don’t build for all distributions, but if you’ve got recent openSUSE, you can find a package for you there
Although some of us might like the idea of playing around with new …

One of the themes from News Foo that continues to resonate with me is the importance of data journalism. That skillset has received renewed attention this winter after Tim Berners-Lee called analyzing data the future of journalism.

When you look at data journalism and the big picture, as USA Today's Anthony DeBarros did at his blog in November, it's clear the recent suite of technologies is part of a continuum of technologically enhanced storytelling that traces back to computer-assisted reporting (CAR).

As DeBarros pointed out, the message of CAR …

We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: What your inbox knows.

The trend for NoSQL stores such as memcache for fast key-value storage should give us pause for thought: what have regular database vendors been doing all this time? An important new project, HandlerSocket, seeks to leverage MySQL's raw speed for key-value storage.

NoSQL databases offer fast key-value storage for use in backing web applications, but years of work on regular relational databases has hardly ignored performance. The main performance hit with regular databases is in interpreting queries.

We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: Kinect democratizes augmented reality.

Today's databases are designed for the spinning platter of the hard disk. They take into account that the slowest part of reading data is seeking: physically getting the read head to the part of the disk it needs to be in. But the emergence of cost effective solid state drives (SSD) is changing all those assumptions.

Over the course of 2010, systems designers have been realizing the benefits of using SSDs in data centers, with major IT vendors and companies adopting them. Drivers for SSD adoption …

I am preparing a series of posts related to Sudoku. I am revisiting the “SQL only” solution I posted somewhere else a long time ago…  This time, we’ll get serious and optimize everything we can!  This lemon will be squeezed to the maximum!

Start your Pharo image (not mandatory since I will provide all necessary SQL scripts) and MySQL server as we’ll try to solve some Sudoku puzzles only with one SQL statement (no stored procedures or functions)!

Part 1 coming soon!