MMUG: Second Meeting Review and Slides

The Malta MySQL User Group (MMUG) met for the second time this Thursday, and compared to last time, we had a much better venue: Ixaris Systems let us use their board room, so we had all the tools we needed to have a good meeting.

We managed to get a group picture before everyone has arrived, so I guess we can call the people in this picture “early birds”.

Once we all arrived, however, Sandro Gauci from EnableSecurity gave us a very interesting talk on SQL Injection security, and general security flaws from a developer point a view. You can find the slides here: sql-injection.pdf.

Here’s a picture of Mr. Gauci while presenting. (Sorry for the obvious problem with the over-white picture — seems like I forgot to turn down the flash, and this was the only non-blurry shot I got.)

Following Mr. Gauci, I went on and delivered a presentation on general backup and recovery scenarios, and ended with a overview of the MySQL Backup functionality as of MySQL 6.0.5. I will go into more detail on this in another blog post, so stay tuned for that.

We had a goal of having presentations take 15 to 20 minutes each. I did 18 on this one, although in the end I went over-time by demonstrating some issues I encountered with a live demo. So although there are only a few slides, there was a lot to talk about at each one. Here they are: mmug-080828.pdf.

In good order after our two presentations, we had an enjoyable discussion around the table while enjoying our refreshments. Some topics that we discussed were master-master replication, maria, data warehousing on MySQL, MySQL Cluster, HA solutions, and general best practices.

Overall, I’m very pleased with this meeting, we had some valuable talks and questions raised during the presentations, and some very good company in good venue. I’d like to thank Pythian, Ixaris, and the MySQL Community team for their support in helping us.