Well, it’s Sunday night so I will put this down to being the weekend. The background to being caught out is a request I made to my local Users Group mailing list for some information on people’s environments because I wanted to some empirical data analysis without having any more knowledge of the systems.

In summary (without the surrounding fan-fare, I was seeking):

SELECT VERSION();
SHOW STATUS;
SHOW VARIABLES;  // Optional

I was however perplexed why my first data point analysis (Read/Write ratio) using the Status values Com_insert, Com_update, Com_delete and Com_select was not always giving me expected results. In particular, a number of server results showed 0 for values while I knew the results came from working MySQL environments.

So, sanity check with good friend Morgan and I get the response to answer the dilemma SHOW STATUS defaults to session …

Frank talks about Storing Passwords in MySQL. He does, however, miss something that’s really, really important. I’m talking about the salting of passwords.

If I want to find out what  5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592 or 015f28b9df1bdd36427dd976fb73b29d MD5s mean, the first thing I’m going to try is a dictionary attack (especially if i’ve seen a table with only user and password columns). Guess what? A list of words and their MD5SUMS can be used to very quickly find what these hashes represent.

I’ll probably have this dictionary in a MySQL database with an index as well. Try it yourself - you’ll probably find a dictionary with the words “hello” and “fire” in it to help. In fact, do this:

mysql> create table words (word varchar(100));
Query OK, 0 rows …

I had need to goto the Wikipedia this morning to review the terminology of something, and on the front page in Today’s featured article is Mercury. Being a tad curious given I’d heard only on the radio a few hours ago that Pluto was no longer a planet in our Solar System, I drilled down to the bottom to check references to other planets (quicker then searching). So at the bottom I found the following graphic and details of The Solar System Summary.

Well blow me down, they didn’t waste any time there. Pluto is no longer a planet in our Solar System. It is now categorised as a …

No, it’s not a bedtime story, is a serious system’s design concept and I’m amazing that people don’t know about this.
As I mentioned in If you don?t know your data, you don?t know your application I was doing a Java Code Review, and I found a clear case of a much simplier solution. How simple you ask?

Well, without completing the task 100%, I achieved in less then 1 day (and lets say for the argument 1 more day of work), what is being worked on by somebody else for a week, with an estimate of 2 more weeks to complete. So let’s add 50% to my estimate, that’s a total of 3 days verses 15 days. You do the math. and yes that was last week and that task is still being worked on the same way, even with reference to my working code. Not to mention the code is a similiar magnitude of simplicity, and simplicity means cost savings in support, people so quickly forget …

The art of data modelling is definitely lost on some [most] people, or they never found it, even though they think they did. Over dinner with good friend Morgan last night we were swapping present stories on the topic.

Morgan wrote recently about I want my 4 bytes back damn it., and interesting example storing an ISBN. Further reference can be found at Getting started with MySQL of a more impractical ISBN example.

Disk is cheap now, so the attitude and poor excuse can be, well a few extra bytes doesn’t matter. Well no! If your a social hacker and have a website with a maximium concurrent connections of 2 maybe, but much like some recent Java Code Reviewing I just performed, just because the system isn’t 24×7, …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

So, FireFox have come up with a novel idea to promote it’s product. Check out Firefox Day.

The official blurb: Share Firefox with a friend. If your friend downloads Firefox before September 15, you?ll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.

You can even choose how to link your names together on the “Firefox Friends Wall”. Examples like ‘my name’ Informed ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Empowered ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Liberated ‘your name’.

Perhaps MySQL can leverage this idea for some what to promote future download!

Since OSCON, most of my time has been focused on editing a book, which is about to be finished. As I’m getting my commutes back, I have been reading up on what I’ve missed on Planet MySQL (which I affectionately call “The ‘planet.”

Y’all are prolific!

Jeremy’s On Open Source Citizenship got me thinking about the whole movement. I think there’s still a place for proprietary software in the world, as much as folks tout that “open source is ALWAYS better, because more people see it, therefore more people can help change it.”

Whenever anyone suggests a monolithic solution, I cringe. This all ties into the patent issues that are strongly debated these days. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about everything.

Jeremy’s article talked about how Yahoo! (as an example) couldn’t just open up all the source, …