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 [...]

On Monday, March 10th, Sun makes a stop in Boston on its world tour of “Mashup Meetups”. If you can’t make it in person, join us on the live ustream videocast at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oursql-the-mysql-database-videocast Currently there’s a promo for your viewing pleasure at (see “Video Clips”). I am very excited about this new videocast for the [...]

This is a public service announcement, and while databases should not have a problem as this Sunday we “spring ahead”, some people might be confused as to why systems were “dead” for an hour, and show no activity/sales/whatever.

This Sunday, March 9th, most locales in Canada and the US start to “save daylight” by “springing ahead” one hour. At 2 am local time (that would be “really late Saturday night” for the party-goers), the time jumps ahead one hour.

Databases such as MySQL should continue to work just fine, but your monitoring graphs will show a dead zone, your sales charts will log no sales, and similar phenomena will occur. Nothing to worry about, but since I haven’t seen the post made yet, I figured I would remind folks.

Well, in the “notes from the front line” part of this post…. I have been a MySQL DBA at The Pythian Group for three months (and 2 days) now. At most companies that is the probationary period, and I am still here, so that is a good sign….. So, after three months, how do I like [...]

In summary: Who: you, me, MySQL/Sun What: MySQL User Group with free swag, food, and a short workshop to boot. When: 7-9 pm, Monday March 10th Where: MIT Building E-51, room 372 Why: why the heck not! Because Sun just bought MySQL, and because there’s a user group each month. How: RSVP optional but requested [...]

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/ Do I really need to say more?

In a linkage of biblical proportions, Log Buffer #83 pointed me to Tom Kyte’s reiteration which pointed me to Coding Horror’s rant about source controlling the database schema. Now, for starters, I agree with Tom’s sarcasm and Coding Horror’s rant — the database schema really should be source controlled in the same place as the application [...]

A company has come up with a vendor-neutral database certification exam. Some are wondering how much use this will be, as it doesn’t go into vendor-specificities. Now, the specifics of how a query optimizer handles queries, how backups, restores and security are done and with MySQL specifically, how different storage engines act are [...]

At the risk of making it seem like this is all we’re talking about here at Pythian, here we go again. Paul Vallee pointed me towards this article by John Dvorak that more or less echoes a blog post I wrote in French the day previous for my personal blog that you can read here: Le [...]

I’m sorry that I haven’t commented on the BEA acquisition. It’s just been too obvious for too long, I can’t get excited even though it’s really really big. Manifest destiny manifested, that’s it. On the other hand… Tip of the hat to Lucas Jellema at AMIS who posts his own commentary on the acquisition and also provides [...]