How-To configure your MySQL to use PAM and/or Active Directory authentication with percona-pam-authentication plugin. Continuing articles about Two-Factor authentication or integrating Linux services with Active Directory, this How-To is one of my recent works that I have done these days, so I hope it may help the community with this guide to configure MySQL with PAM and subsequently using Active Directory to authenticate. If you are new here, please refer to SSH Two-Factor authentication, which explains how to install likewise and integrate your Linux with AD. However, we will have few exceptions to get MySQL working with PAM authentication.

Before you continue, please make sure that you have MySQL 5.5.16 or a newer version, otherwise it can …

If you use MySQL Replication, 99% of the times your main concern is to keep the master and the slave fully consistent and in sync. Some applications require exactly the opposite.

Let's take, for example, some reporting solutions. You may want to run reports against a data mart (ok, I can see some BI experts here jumping off their chairs - please forgive the simplification for the sake of this example), that is a subset of the whole historical data within your data warehouse. So, you may have a master server containing only the last 3 months of your sales and a slave containing three years of sales. Sales managers can happily to see current year/previous year rolling comparisons using the slave server and at the same time they can run faster current month/previous month reports on their master.

There are many ways to prepare the data mart and the historical DB. The easiest thing to do is to remove the oldest rows from the …

Here are few tips if you are going to install the MySQL Coolstack package on Sun Solaris.

First of all, let me say that, as usual, these tips are based on my personal experience and they may not be applicable to your sw version or environment. For this specific tip, I can't say if it is applicable for all versions of Solaris - 9, 10, OpenSolaris, X86, SPARC etc.

You can get the Coolstack from here - http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack. Within Coolstack you will find CSKmysql, a specific 64 bit package prepared by Sun that provides some interesting performance improvements. Coolstack has been built with Sun Studio from the same source used to build the standard versions. Also, CSKmysql provides Dtrace probes - I am sure some will find this feature a great plus. The last available version, 1.3.1, is based on MySQL 5.1.25RC.

When …