Open Source means that the source code is open. There are many inferences that can be made from this, and many stereotypes that can be applied, but in the end, all it means is that you can read the source code as well as use the binaries.I am not a developer. I fully admit this. What I mean by this is that my strengths do not lie in engineering new code to do things. Give me some Lego™s or some Wedgits™ and I look at the instructions to see what to build.However, I am an engineer.One of my team's current tasks is to restore a backup (using InnoDB Hot Backup, and compressed) from a client's production machine to a development instance.....Weekly -- thus we want to automate it......And did I mention the development machine has 5 different MySQL instances on it, running all on 127.0.0.1 on different ports?The steps are:0) stop the desired mysql instance 1) move the development datadir and logs to a backup  []

This is the first place I am announcing this: The Pythian Group has made me a Team Lead. I am extremely honored and somewhat humbled by this, and I am determined to do a good job. I started officially on Monday, March 3rd, and my first week went pretty well. On Saturday, I spent a short bit of time automating one process. And while I was waiting for a 300G backup to copy from one machine to another, I worked on automatin

One of my colleagues made a typo in a query today that led to me discovering this issue -- I think it's a bug, though it may just be how the language is defined. But certainly a subquery that cannot run should not act as if it returns TRUE.mysql> use test;Reading table information for completion of table and column namesYou can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -ADatabase changedmysql> create table foo (fid tinyint unsigned not null primary key); create tabl

Pythian DBA's have daily reports for each monitored database and some of the components are using charts to visualize the data. I'm a big fan of charts myself (when applied appropriately) and want to show how you can generate simple charts directly from the database. You'd be very surprised how easy it can be done from *any* database without installing any additional software or configuring something special.This method is not limited to Oracle by any means -- use it with MySQL, SQL Server or any other database as well as without a database -- yes, visualize your sar data now!In this example, we will plot a pie diagram with Oracle tablespaces. This would be very handy when you are starting to analyze the space allocation for a database. Here is the end result of the report for my Grid Control repository test database:

I don't want to post the link to this (perhaps, it was left public unintentional?) but here is what I stumbled upon recently. This is a log of production maintenance of IT systems in Perth, Western Australia (as far as I could say):Good idea but

Consistent backup:A consistent backup is one that represents a snapshot of all data at a point in time. Consistent backups are used for disaster recovery. An inconsistent backup can be useful for retrieving partial data -- for example, if a long-time customer accidentally deletes information from his profile, you can go back to an inconsistent backup and retrieve that information. It is not important that all the data be consistent with each other when retrieving a partial amount of point-in-time data.Logical backups:

Today's contradiction:MySQL has server variables named "new" and "old".The "new" variable can be set per-session and globally, and is dynamic. The "old" variable is not dynamic, and only global in scope. Both default to FALSE in MySQL 5.1.According to the manual, the "new" variable:was used in MySQL 4.0 to turn on some 4.1

As Baron points out, Percona's Xtrabackup tool can be used just like InnoDB Hot Backup.Many are wondering, "is it good enough?" In fact, I wondered the same thing, and after a few weeks of using and testing Xtrabackup (on machines that have MyISAM and InnoDB tables), I can say:0) We have not run into any problems with

If you have a 12-server MySQL Cluster with:1 Management Node3 SQL Nodes2 Data Node Groups, 4 Data Nodes per groupAnd each machine is configured to allocate 1G of memory for its function, how much data (data + indexes) can you store in total in your cluster?You can guess, but you get bonus points if you explain why and the explanation is correct.

As folks are making their plans to go to the MySQL User Conference, I just wanted to remind folks of the schedule of MySQL Camp.One feature I put together for MySQL Camp but anyone can use is a restaurant list for the hotel area. There's very little within walking distance, but many people will be local or will rent a car, so finding someone to drive with should not be a problem. The restaurant list is on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SantaClaraRestaurants -- updates are welcome!About MySQL Camp: MySQL Camp is completely free, just walk on in and enjoy the sessions. All sessions are in the Bayshore room off the Mezzanine, and there will be signs directing you to the MySQL Camp room. I describe it as being like "an additional room for the MySQL Conference, but it's free." It also has some of the more technical, hands-on talks that did not make it to the conference.

It's always the little things in life. One of the things that has been a very "little thing" that causes a lot of frustration while writing The MySQL Administrator's Bible is the prompt. Specifically, the fact that you can only change the first line of the prompt, but not the subsequent lines.

This is an issue that keeps rearing its ugly head over and over again, and since it greatly affects performance, it is most important that DBAs of any DMBS running on Linux come to grips with it. So I decided to do some research and try different settings on my notebook. Here are my findings.What can you find on the web?A Wikipedia search for the word swappiness will come up empty (any volunteers out there want to write an article?). A Google search will show some pretty old material---the best article I found is from 2004: Linux: Tuning Swappiness. This article includes a detailed discussion with some interesting remarks by Andrew Morton, a Linux kernel maintainer.So, what is swappiness?

Lenz Grimmer recently wrote two blogs about password security on MySQL. Both are worth reading in detail. You'll find them in Basic MySQL Security: Providing passwords on the command line and More on MySQL password security. Although I wrote a comment on the latter one, there is one point I thought was worth its own blog.

When using Oracle, the data dictionary provides us with tons of tables and views, allowing us to fetch information about pretty much anything within the database. We do have information like that in MySQL 5.0 (and up) in the "information_schema" database, but it's scattered through several different tables.Sometimes a client asks us to change the datatype of a column, but forgets to mention the schema name, and sometimes even the table name. As you can imagine, having this kind of information is vital to locate the object and perform the requested action. This kind of behaviour must be related to Murphy's Law.In any case, I'd like to share with you a simple stored procedure that has helped us a lot in the past.

The Malta MySQL User Group (MMUG) met for the second time this Thursday, and compared to last time, we had a much better venue: Ixaris Systems let us use their board room, so we had all the tools we needed to have a good meeting. We managed to get a group picture before everyone has arrived, so I guess we can call the people in this picture "early birds". Once we all arrived, however, Sandro Gauci from EnableSecurity gave us a very interesting talk on SQL Injection security, and general security flaws from a developer point a view. You can find the slides here: sql-injection.pdf.Here's a picture of Mr. Gauci while presenting. (Sorry for the obvious problem with the over-white picture -- seems like I forgot to turn down the flash, and this was the only non-blurry shot I got.)

There's no video for Jacob Nikom's December 2007 Boston MySQL User Group meeting, but the slides for "Measuring MySQL Server Performance" can be downloaded (2.33 MB) at http://technocation.org/files/doc/Measuring_MySQL_server_performance_03.pptAnd with that, this is (I believe) post #10,000 at Planet MySQL!

Hi All!This year, the International Free Software Forum celebrated its 10th anniversary. It happened last week in Porto Alegre.Pythian presented a session on Thursday called 8 Rules for Designing More Secure Applications with MySQL. As promised, here are the slides we used on that session:

I was recently asked a question by someone who had attended my Shmoocon talk entitled "Why are Databases So Hard to Secure?". PDF slides are available (1.34 Mb). I was going to put this into a more formal structure, but the conversational nature works really well. I would love to see comments reflecting others' thoughts.I found several things of interest in your talk about database security and several new things to think about.In particular I realized that DBMSs have at least two hats in the world of software architecture namely as technical services ("smart file system") and as application framework. Perhaps that "depth" is one of the reasons why dbms is hard to secure? For example, considering just the question of who or what have user roles within a DBMS deployment. From the "deep" point of view, the "user" could be an application, or a module, or just the next layer up  []

Slides:http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/2009Keynote.pdfReferences:I am @sheeri on twitterMy blog is at http://pythian.com/blogs/author/sheeriMy e-mail is cabral@pythian.comPythian became the first ever Sun Enterprise Remote DBA Partner -- read the details at http://tinyurl.com/pythiansun.

Here are the slides and links I am using for the "Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking" at the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo.pdf slidesWhere to Start:http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.phpi-hacked.com/content/view/23/42