I was contacted by Doug Henschen on Monday for an article he was writing for Intelligent Enterprise on Oracle’s just announced promises to the European Commission regarding MySQL.  It turns out Doug was polling all the major open source data warehousing and business intelligence vendors to get our perspectives on the promises, and it appears as if we all had roughly the same response:  “cautious optimism” as Doug put it.

Having invented the industry’s first SQL Chip that improves the performance and scalability of reporting and analytics for MySQL by 10x – 1000x, we have been keenly interested and aware of Oracle’s announced intent to acquire Sun, and along with it MySQL.  While we have architected our product to work with other database management systems …

MySQL Workbench provides secured access to MySQL Instances and Servers using SSH. The follow FAQ formated blog post shows a few details on what this is and how it works.

What is SSH?
A secure shell and communications tool

Secure Shell

• Replaces older insecure telnet, rsh, rlogin, rcp
• Provides the same functionality with added security.
• Avoids passing clear text user-ids & passwords
• Supports strong encryption for user authentication

Secure communications

• All TCP traffic sent through ssh can be strongly encrypted.
• Means that various TCP protocols can be given the same strong level of encryption as the ssh channel.

How is SSH used in Workbench?
Two ways

• As a secure communication tunnel for Direct MySQL connections
• As a method to remotely …

As part of reviewing storage engines for my work on the upcoming Expert PHP and MySQL book, I finally had an excuse to try out the InnoDB Plugin for MySQL which is now conveniently included with MySQL 5.1 since 5.1.38.

Following the MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual instructions at 13.6. The InnoDB Storage Engine I included the bare minimum as documented to my my.cnf.

[mysqld]
ignore-builtin-innodb
plugin-load=innodb=ha_innodb_plugin.so ;innodb_trx=ha_innodb_plugin.so ;innodb_locks=ha_innodb_plugin.so ;innodb_cmp=ha_innodb_plugin.so ;innodb_cmp_reset=ha_innodb_plugin.so ;innodb_cmpmem=ha_innodb_plugin.so ;innodb_cmpmem_reset=ha_innodb_plugin.so

However to my misfortune the following error occured.

091212 17:45:14 [ERROR] Can't open shared library …

For those of you that attended today’s webinar or for those of you who were unable to do so, we discussed and demo’ed many of the new exciting features in Workbench 5.2.

The presentation slides in pdf and audio are available –

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-472.html

If you are currently using MySQL Query Browser or MySQL Administrator, you’ll be pleased to know that their functionality is now in MySQL Workbench, creating a single, unified GUI for designing, developing and administering MySQL databases.

For more info visit:

• WB Downloads: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/
• WB Forums: …

From NY Post: Oracle Leader Blinks – Larry’s Olive Branch (to the EU), the NYpost sources apparently say that “what [...] Ellison is proposing is the creation of a firewall between MySQL and the rest of the combined company, and possibly setting up an entirely separate board for the MySQL business.”

There is no independent confirmation of any of this, so it may be true, or just air, or a trial balloon to see how other parties respond… I’m not going to add opinions to this, I just reckon it’s an interesting progression in the case. We’ll see how it pans out.

Update: so it’s not true (see Reuters).

(so now I’ll add my opinion…) Unfortunate in a way because from my perspective it …

The No-SQL tag really lumps together a lot of concepts that are in fact as distinct from eachother as they are from SQL/RDBMS.

An object store is not at all similar to Cassandra and Hypertable, which is not at all like an column store. And when looking at BigTable derivatives, it’s quite important to realise that Google actually does joins in middle layers or apps, so while BigTable does not have joins, the apps essentially do use them – I’ve heard it professed that denormalising everything might be a fab idea, but I don’t quite believe in that for all cases, just like I don’t believe in ditching the structured form of RDBMS being the solution.

SQL/RDBMS has had a few decades of dominance now, and has thus become the great “general purpose” tool. With the ascent of all the other tools, it’s definitely worthwhile to look at them, but also realise that each (inluding SQL based ones) have their place. Moving all your …

In my last blog entry, I discussed a “silent” install method for deploying MySQL on Windows.  However, the best way to distribute MySQL may be to not install it.  Instead, design the application to launch mysql from the command line.  With this method, you can deploy with two files, avoid registry entries, and hide database files from end-users and their IT staff.

[Note:  these instructions may also be useful if you can't get the MySQL installer to run on a particular Windows machine.  I find it easier to copy the system tables from an existing install of MySQL that was deployed with the Windows MSI installer.  Nevertheless, you could download the "without installer" MySQL zip file and use the mysql_system_tables.sql and mysql_system_table_data.sql to create your system tables.  I had to remove the "WHERE @had_user_table=0" from the mysql_system_table_data.sql to get it to work.  The SC.exe tool …

I’m sick of looking through chat logs to find an IP geo lookup database.

Now it’s here, possibly forever, or until I stop paying for hosting.

The security plugin for MySQL namely Securich has been migrated to google code a while ago for availability and usability purposes. Last week I finished testing and made available version 0.2.0 which includes some important enhancements like

* Added reconciliation from mysql to securich during installation

The above feature enables the installation of securich on instances already in operation without loosing any of the current user base and associated privileges (unlike previous versions which were mostly usable on new instances without user base).

* Added mysql version check for connection kill using processlist view in information_schema available as from 5.1.7

* Added auditing of users changing password via MySQLs own `set_password`
* Added auditing of role creation and updates
* Added auditing of grants / revokes

With auditing, the dba will be able to look at when a particular permission …

Our contest to give away one of our blazingly fast Kickfire Analytic Appliances to a deserving organization is heading into the home stretch. We have already had almost 1,000 people voice their opinion and encourage everyone interested in data warehousing, business intelligence, MySQL, open source, or any other aspect of this contest to vote for their favorite semi-finalist before 5:00P PT Tuesday, December 1st.  We will announce the winner on Wednesday, December 5th.

To enter the contest, we asked organizations to submit their most compelling story of “data warehouse pain.” Our esteemed judges, Curt Monash, founder of Monash Research (www.monash.com) and publisher of DBMS2, Joy Mundy, principal at the Kimball Group (www.kimballgroup.com), Peter Zaitsev, founder and chief executive officer of Percona ( …