MySQL and WordPress welcome Google Cloud Storage

OblakSoft is pleased to announce that the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL (ClouSE) now supports Google Cloud Storage.  Using MySQL to store data directly in Google Cloud Storage becomes a simple deployment choice: pick your Google Cloud Storage bucket and migrate any or all of your tables to the cloud.  We would like to thank Google storage team for their support and contributions.

This functionality opens Google Cloud Storage to millions of MySQL-based applications – cloud storage becomes a better alternative to local storage, no matter where you host the application, on premise or in the cloud.  Applications can now store data on Google’s infrastructure, and enjoy high availability, high durability and high scalability of …

Advanced Weblob operations help to use Weblobs most effectively.

Weblob recap

In an earlier post I introduced Weblobs.  Weblob is a new data type that is supported by the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL (ClouSE).  To a database developer, a WEBLOB behaves (almost) like a regular BLOB.  However, in addition to the regular BLOB functionality, Weblobs can be downloaded directly from Amazon S3 by HTTP URLs.

In MySQL, a Weblob is expressed via a pair of BLOB fields that have a special naming convention: field_name$wblob and field_name$wblob_info.  The latter field is what provides the Weblob functionality.  It can be used to retrieve the direct Amazon S3 URL for the BLOB content. …

I got a few questions like the ones below that I’d like to address to avoid further confusion.
How exactly secure is ClouSE for MySQL, the first secure database in the cloud? Am I protected against standard application level security attacks or even accidental admin mistakes?
With the help of ClouSE I get instantaneous backup for my database on the highly durable cloud storage. But how would I protect my data in case a malicious attack or an accident did occur?

Re: security

I’ve got a comment pointing out that data encryption on the storage level doesn’t protect from SQL injections.  Of course, data encryption does not protect from SQL injections (as long as there is SQL involved, there will be a risk of a SQL injection).  Neither does it protect from the infinite number …

Want to learn how you can store your sensitive data in the cloud storage? Take a look at the thorough and honest security analysis of the approach you can take to deploy your existing MySQL workloads to cloud.

keep reading in August issue of Hackin9 security magazine.

Cloud-powered BLOB type provides ACID guarantees and fast direct access to blobs via Web URLs.

Storing unstructured data

Typically unstructured data (such as pictures, media files, documents)

a) Is either stored on the file system, unlike the related with it relational data which is stored in the database. This is well known, “convenient” practice that allows fast access to files but offers no transactional story and no unified data management (for db and filesystem)

b) Or is stored in BLOBs. This ensures transactional consistency and reduces management complexities, but is really bad for performance and scalability.

We took advantage of the cloud, and came up with an upgrade to the BLOB – a solution that combines the benefits of the two.

Weblob data type

Weblob is a new data type that is supported by the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL ( …

WordPress on S3: no more backups

How much trouble will it be if your webserver failed?  No trouble at all, if your website keeps its content on reliable Amazon S3 storage.

There are a lot of nuances in ensuring proper backups and restores of websites. When was the last backup taken? How much data might have been lost? How long will it take to recover it? When was the last time you tested restore? Do you even have an offsite backup?

Now that you can run dynamic websites off Amazon S3 storage, we’ll demonstrate why you no longer need to worry about backing up and restoring your website data. Losing the webserver is no longer a disaster. Cloud storage offers almost unsurpassable reliability a lot of website owners (small & large) would benefit from. In a way you get an "instantaneous backup" to the cloud. …

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

…

Any time you can get two for the price of one (a “2Fer”), you’re ahead of the game. By implementing our shared cache as a separate tier, you get (1) improved performance and (2) storage flexibility…a 2Fer.

What do I mean by storage flexibility? It means you can use enterprise storage, cloud storage or PC-based storage. Other shared-disk cluster databases require high-end enterprise storage like a NAS or SAN. This requirement was driven by the need for:

1. High-performance storage
2. Highly available storage
3. Multi-attach, or sharing data from a single volume of LUN across multiple nodes in the cluster.

Quite simply, you won’t see other shared-disk clustering databases using cloud storage or PC-based storage. However, the vast majority of MySQL users rely on PC-based storage, and most are not willing to pay the big bucks for high-end storage.

ScaleDB’s Cache …

We announced support for Oracle today. Specifically, Amanda Enterprise now protects:

• Oracle 11g on Windows
• Oracle 10g and 11g on Linux and Solaris
• Oracle Enterprise Linux

On Linux and Solaris, we took the approach of integrating Amanda with RMAN. Keeping with Amanda’s philosophy of using native tools as closely as possible, we allow Oracle DBAs to perform recovery right from within Oracle Enterprise Manager. Amanda takes care of restoring all files needed for a DBA to perform recovery specific to their need (e.g. table level recovery or point-in-time recovery).

For Windows, on recommendation from backup experts at Oracle, we integrated with their new VSS writer. This enables us to take quick snapshot …