Entries by Solomon K. Chang

By Solomon Chang

Maatkit (available at http://www.maatkit.org) makes MySQL easier and safer to manage. It provides simple, predictable ways to do things you cannot otherwise do. It would be nice if these features were included with MySQL, but they are not. That's why Maatkit is now shipping by default with many GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and CentOS.

You can use Maatkit to prove replication is working correctly, fix corrupted data, automate repetitive tasks, speed up your servers, and much, much more.

And best of all, Maatkit is Free Software so you can modify, inspect, and redistribute it yourself.

By Solomon Chang

There are whispered rumors from the remote corners of MySQL configuration gurus concerning the Dark Art of running more than one instance on MySQL on the same machine. Like a body possessed by a legion host of demons (well, MySQL daemons, actually), a single machine could serve multiple instances of MySQL that each may respond to different names, ports, and... dare I say it...? IP addresses! Oh, the horror! The terror! The memory consumption!
However, just as summoning and binding nether-worldly entities into an unwilling mortal shell has its own nefarious uses, so too does the black magic of invoking two or more instances of mysqld on the same single machine. Slowly and surely, it is a gateway for you to embark upon other unspeakable database experiments, such as Replication and Distributed Clustering, whilst obviating the need for any other machine. Replication with but a single computer, you say? Yea, it is an abomination! But this abomination you can configure for yourself while dangling your sanity between hard drive capacity and memory usage!
Muhahahahaha!
Ph'nglul mglw'nath MySQL Instance Manager R'yleh!
MySQL Fhtagn!

Black robes and candles optional.

When he is not obsessing over the stories of HP Lovecraft, Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator in El Segundo, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

By Solomon Chang

There comes a time in the life cycle of a company where everyone has to stop connecting as password-less root to their central database. All the inherent security protocols (such as "We only have 3 users," or "No one here is malicious enough or knowledgeable enough to crack our Production database!") begin to lose relevance as the DB user base starts to grow. This talk aims at the "why" and the "how" of setting user permissions, as well as how users are generally authenticated into the system. This talk also delves into the granularity of permissions for those who require extremely fine-tuned access to database resources.

Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator in Venice Beach, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

Adobe Flex is a collection of technologies released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross platform, rich Internet applications based on the proprietary Adobe Flash platform. The initial release in March 2004 by Macromedia included a software development kit, an IDE, and a J2EE integration application known as Flex Data Services.

Flex is a hot (open source) topic this year and Linux users aren't left out. With the newly announced Adobe AIR for Linux and the upcoming Flex Builder 3 for Linux desktops, everyone can develop cross-browser/platform applications for the Web (SWF) or any popular desktop operating system (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). Chris Charlton will be covering how to develop in Flex and deploy an RIA with one code-base while not having to worry about platform or browser differences.

So what is Flex and doesn't it cost money? The Flex SDK is free - containing a debugger, compiler, and the entire Flex framework. Adobe's IDE (Flex Builder) costs $250 (Standard Edition) and is free for students and teachers.

What's the difference between Flash and Flex? Why not just use Ajax? Good questions, but you'll want to attend the next LAMPSIG meeting to ask and find out!

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Chris Charlton has tons of community involvement: authorized Adobe Flex Champion, Adobe User Group Manager for LA AIR, helps run LA Drupal, is co-author of the book Advanced Flex Application Development: Building RichMediaX, and teaches at the Rich Media Institute.

The integration of Business intelligence and logic within the database has been a long requested feature for MySQL. With version 5.0, MySQL delivered a stored procedure implementation and here we extend it to provide general support for external language stored procedures.

We detail the philosophy and design of the external language stored procedure framework and its implementation within the server and libraries. We then also detail how an external language plug-in is written using the simple skeleton plug-in which exercises the basic interfaces between the server and external stored procedures.

Demonstrations using the already developed plug-ins, including an overview of the implementation for the simple XML-RPC and the more sophisticated Java plug-ins, writing stored procedures and functions, with ideas for applications and their utility.

This presentation includes a tour of the actual source code, highlighting the big picture. The audience will see the low impact of the main-line server code, the simplicity of writing plug-ins for new languages and the ease of using the language plug-ins already developed. This is an exciting new feature preview for MySQL. All demonstrations are with live running examples which everyone can try for themselves: No mockups, no screen-shots.