Author: Augusto Bott

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: 8 Simple Rules to Design Secure Apps with MySQL.

Welcome, readers! It’s time for another update to our series of posts on installing Oracle on Ubuntu Linux. In this edition, we’ll be installing Oracle 11g R1 on Ubuntu 9.04, both 32-bit. This time, I’ve used VirtualBox to run a virtual machine (VM) to perform our work.

I’m very proud to share with you a few things: Sheeri K. Cabral, Nick Westerlund, Paul Vallée, Peter Ling, and I (Augusto Bott) will be in Santa Clara, CA for the MySQL Conference and Expo, MySQL Camp, and the Percona Performance Conference, next week.

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 other day, a client mentioned they were getting strange results when running ALTER TABLE. The episode involved modifying an existing primary key to add an auto_increment primary key: it was “shifting” values. Say what?! As it turns out, it was a very special value getting changed: zero. Some fiddling revealed the underlying reason. Care to join me? To understand what’s going on, follow the example below as we start with an empty database, create a table and insert a few rows

Hello, there! With another Ubuntu release, it has come the time to update our series of posts on how to install Oracle 11g on Ubuntu. In this post, we’ll see the steps needed to install Oracle 11gR1 on an Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex box all the way to creating your very first database. I’ve been working very hard to ensure that at every new post, the results you get when executing this procedure are as deterministic as possible, leading to a successful setup.

The other day we began to encounter weird and random errors on small and innocent queries that shouldn’t give any errors at all. It all lead to one of our most basic health checks failing for no apparent reason. The first clue that popped into our minds was related to case-sensitivity, since the failing check was looking for the column names of the only table in the schema with UPPER CASE name. This symptom was especially weird since all of this was happening on MySQL setups running on Windows, and so we’re not sure if this was being caused by some internal code library, MySQL, or Windows itself. Here’s how to fix it.

So you want to store URLs in MySQL, and the URLs have those annoying %20%27%7C%26%5E%2B%2D%25 symbols? And you want to be able to show your users some kind of human-readable information. You might want to consider using this trick. Take this list of commonly escaped characters as an example…

I arrived at Santa Clara yesterday, just in time for the MySQL Community dinner (check this post on Arjen’s blog). It was a lot of fun, not to mention the opportunity to talk to developers and other folks from MySQL/Sun. I’ve been to a bunch of great presentations and sessions so far, have a look at my post to find out more and stay tuned for updates.

After many requests from readers, I’ve put together new, revised version of the Oracle 11g on Ubuntu recipe. This new version is a little different than the first one published: it’s based on a bare-bones install of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) server version instead of the desktop version. As an improvement, I’ve tried to pare down dependencies to a minimal set. Your feedback is more than welcome — it’s the main reason why I wrote a new version of this HOWTO. I’ve also tested and repeated this procedure twice. Even so, it might still have problems, so please let me know so we can improve it 1.