i.justrealized

Oracle shuts down open source test servers that PostgreSQL uses to test their builds. PostgreSQL is competing with Oracle’s MySQL and Oracle Database.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers

Like most open source platforms, PostgreSQL relies on an army of distributed volunteers. It is volunteers that, for example, operate the PostgreSQL Build farm, a “distributed, automated build and verify system” built by enthusiast Andrew Dunstan.

Oracle has shut down servers Sun Microsystems was contributing to the build farm for open source database software, PostgreSQL, forcing enthusiasts to scramble to find new hosts to test updates to their software on the Solaris operating system.

“It’s a vital piece of the infrastructure for developing PostgreSQL,” Dunstan told iTnews. “Before it existed, if some change we made broke on some platform, it was often weeks or months before we found out about it. Now we know within hours.”

At the start of July, Oracle shut down its three PostgreSQL build farm servers without warning, leaving the PostgreSQL community rushing to find replacements.

Dunstan said he “suspects” Oracle does view PostgreSQL as a competitor. (Source: IT News)

I love to see Oracle post their financial results, they have made quite a bit of cost cutting moves since the acquisition. You can hardly blame them too; they’ve got shareholders to report to. After all, doing too much charity work on open source is partly why Sun Microsystems failed in the first place.

A couple of days ago, I encountered a database corruption. One sentence: My access log grew so huge it took up 100% of the disk space; MySQL can no longer write the database files and a few tables got corrupted.

Okay I cheated on the one sentence.

Rackspace Cloud has similar build as Slicehost (my previous host). I moved a few of my blogs over. Currently Slicehost is like an expensive DNS server. That said, Rackspace Cloud is cheaper than Slicehost. Slicehost is a subsidiary of Rackspace. Well anyway, if you do like to use Rackspace and would like to make my day, use my referrer code ‘REF-KW’ without quotations. It gives me some rebate, I think.

These kind of things always scare me. I never could trust saving my card number into any online services because of this.

Unconfirmed Reports of Massive T-Mobile Breach

Early reports indicate that hackers have penetrated the T-Mobile U.S. network and stolen proprietary operating data, customer databases and financial records. According to a post on insecure.org, the hackers have claimed to be auctioning the pilfered data to the highest bidder. T-Mobile competitors, they say, turned them down.

There are no details as to how the hackers achieved the breach, but they did post code to show that they did penetrate the T-Mobile network.

T-Mobile was the target of a masssive 2005 hack, in which Nicholas Jacobsen was charged with unauthorized network access by the U.S. Secret Service. According to published reports, Jacobsen had access to all the information about T-Mobile’s 16 million U.S. subscribers.

T-Mobile subscribers are also the frequent target of e-mail and text messaging phishing scams.

UPDATE: There is no mention of a security breach or incident on T-Mobile’s Web site. We spoke with T-Mobile Saturday night, and they were unaware of the reported incident. They were looking into it, but stil have not provided a formal response.

From: http://blogs.channelinsider.com/secure_channel/content/data_security/early_reports_of_massive_t-mobile_breach.html

Or Gzip for the matter. Here’s the command to run in your UNIX-based server to import or export via an SQL file, this is useful for performing backup and restoring of a MySQL database. (I wrote a similar import and export guide for PostgreSQL.) The mysqldump utility performs just that:

Exporting using mysqldump:

For example, my username is ‘kahwee’, my password being ‘secret’ and database being ‘justrealized_db’, I would run the following to export my database to a SQL file:

And to Gzip:

Importing using mysql:

To import back, we can use the mysql utility in a similar fashion, note that the > (greater than) has change to a < (lesser than).

For example, my username is ‘kahwee’, my password being ‘secret’ and database being ‘justrealized_db’, I would run the following to import my database:

And to Ungzip:

Backing up and restoring MySQL databases in Windows

Unfortunately, you can’t use gzip here. So all those commands above with gzip can’t work. The rest, however, still works. However, mysqldump and mysql may not be set in your system environment variables. These are instructions on how to add them for Windows Vista:

Click on ‘Edit the system environment variables’, a dialog box will pop up. Click on ‘Environment Variables…’, you should be greeted with the following dialog box:

My path looks like this before I add anything:

Append your MySQL bin directory at the back of what is already there. I use XAMPP (XAMPP lite to be specific) which has its MySQL bin folder located here ‘;C:\xampplite\mysql\bin\’, so I would be appending this:

That’s all I guess, hope it is helpful for you.

When you delete large portions for data from your MySQL table, the database becomes more fragmented. It is always a good idea to re-optimize your MySQL database especially if you have a lot of varying characters (VARCHAR). Here’s the command to optimize just one table:

But I am looking for a more command line solution and here it is:

The ‘o’ refers to optimize. And the ‘p’ is the option for password requirement. You’ll be prompted for the password.

If you’re logged in as user ‘john’ in your SSH, the MySQL username will be ‘john’. If that’s not what you want, use option ‘u’ like this:

And to optimize all databases:

You can also use option ‘r’ to repair.

Note that the optimization only works for MyISAM, InnoDB, and ARCHIVE tables.

What? You can patent that?

Abstract

A computer Implemented method of automatically removing space characters from data being entered into a database system are provided. When a user creates a table in a database system into which data having leading and/or trailing character spaces may be entered, the user may specifically instruct the database system to remove any character spaces before entering the data into the table. Consequently, when a piece of data is being entered into the table, the database system will determine whether the piece of data includes leading and/or trailing character spaces. If so, the database system will automatically remove the character spaces from the piece of data before it is entered into the table. Hence, the use of TRIM functions when retrieving data from the database system will be obviated. (Source: USPTO)

Well it’s a fairly simple idea…

This guide aims to go through installation of PEAR modules using XAMPP. The module to install is MDB2.

I use XAMPP Lite instead of the full XAMPP but I imagine it to be the similar. My platform is Windows Vista.

0. Objective

To install PEAR module, MDB2, using a XAMPP set up. Also install the MySQL, MySQLi and PostgreSQL drivers.

1. Setting up environment variables

(more…)