I’ve been back on Chrome pretty much full-time, especially since I figured out some proxy stuff, so the new After the Deadline checker for Google Chrome is a lifesaver. See also: Download Squad.

While at the MySQL Conference, I caught up with Barry Abrahamson, the systems wrangler/de-facto DBA behind Wordpress.com (and all other Automattic properties). Watch the video.

You probably already know that Wordpress itself is built on top of MySQL. And despite everything you might have heard about our (MySQL/Sun’s) new founders, Wordpress is MySQL today, and for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I digress.

Wordpress.com has about 70 million tables, and tens of thousands of blogs. Large amount of tables, serve for easy sharding - …

Do you use mod_auth_mysql, the Apache module that allows authentication of users to happen through a MySQL database?

If so, the nice folk at Automattic (makers of fine blogging software like Wordpress) have released a patched version that works with phpass.

With this, you can now have single sign on (SSO), with authentication against a WordPress blog (or bbPress forum). Note that WordPress (in 2.5 and later), doesn’t use MD5 hashes to store passwords any longer; instead they are salted and hashed with the phpass library. The Automattic folk use this to provide SSO for Trac and Subversion.

Read …