Category Archives: General
In this primer I will show how to improve the security of your MariaDB installation by using two-step verification and how to use it from your Windows GUI client.
Let’s suppose you have your data in MariaDB, installed, say, on Ubuntu. And your users connect to it to run ad hoc queries, using some sort of a Windows GUI client. You don’t want them to write the access password on post-it notes or have it auto-entered by the client. And you don’t want anyone see the password when one of the salespersons connects to the mother ship from his laptop in the Internet café. …
Continue reading “MariaDB: Improve Security with Two-Step Verification”
Parts of the world are already celebrating Christmas Eve and it’s time to relax and spend time with family and friends. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas this is when there is time for less work. Here are a few words to round off MariaDB’s current state and where it’s heading.
This year culminated in MariaDB 5.3.3, the release candidate of 5.3. This is a significant release that makes years of work available by default in the database server. Earlier releases still required features to be explicitly switched on, but thanks to thorough testing assuring the quality of the new functionality we have now enabled them. …
We have lately been talking about some upcoming features that we feel are important to MariaDB users, because the corresponding ones that will be provided with MySQL will be incompatible with MariaDB and closed source.
We’re happy to announce the following:
- The next version of MariaDB, version 5.2.10 will include an open source PAM Authentication Plugin. MariaDB 5.2.10 is scheduled for release next week.
- A Windows Authentication Plugin is in development and QA currently and will be part of MariaDB 5.2.11, which is scheduled for release before Christmas.
- MariaDB 5.5 will include both of the above plugins and an open source thread pool implementation.
…
As you may know, since version 5.2.0 (released in April 2010) we support Pluggable Authentication. Using this feature one can implement an arbitrary user authentication and account management policy, completely replacing built-in MariaDB authentication with its username/password combination and mysql.user table.
Also, as you might have heard, Oracle has recently released a PAM authentication plugin for MySQL. Alas, this plugin will not run on MariaDB — although the MySQL implementation of pluggable authentication is based on ours, the API is incompatible. And, being closed source, this plugin cannot be fixed to run in MariaDB. And — I’m not making it up — this plugin does not support communication between the client and the server, so even with this plugin and all the power of PAM the only possible authentication method remains a simple username/password combination. …
Continue reading “Writing a MariaDB PAM Authentication Plugin”
Here is the printed schedule for 2011-11-13: MariaDB-εφημερίδα-13-Nov-2011.pdf …
Continue reading “MariaDB Developer Meeting, Athens – 2011-11-13 Schedule”
Here is the printed schedule for 2011-11-12: MariaDB εφημερίδα – 12 Nov 2011 …
Continue reading “MariaDB Developer Meeting, Athens – 2011-11-12 Schedule”
Here is the printed schedule for 2011-11-11: MariaDB-εφημερίδα-11-Nov-2011.pdf
Continue reading “MariaDB Developer Meeting, Athens – 2011-11-11 Schedule”
I just finished reading a couple of interesting, and somewhat related, blog posts which I think are worth sharing (apologies to anyone who has already seen them). One is from Jelastic and the other is from Michal Hrušecký.
I’ve written about MariaDB and the Jelastic cloud before (see MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform). Now Jelastic has published statistics on the relative popularity of the various databases they offer. The good news is MariaDB is currently the database of choice for 14% of their customers. The bad news is that we’re in fourth place behind their other three database choices (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB). …