MySQL 5.5 Authentication Goodies

MySQL 5.5 is currently in the Release Candidate phase and making good
progress on the way to being a Generally Available release. There
are many new features that will improve performance, make service
more robust, and generally make life better for DBAs. But since
5.5.7 was released for evaluation in October, there has not been a
lot of attention given to the changes in authentication.

To greatly simplify, MySQL has a table with a list of users and a
list of hosts from which those users are allowed access. So user
'jones' and the host they connect from are checked to make sure they
are allowed access. If they match, they can access the instance.

As of 5.5.7, MySQL authentication now supports pluggable
authentication and proxies. So now you can use PAM, Windows native
authentication, LDAP, or something similar to control user accounts.
Or use proxies for group of users. For example user 'smith' is in the
'programmer' group in the LDAP directory. But there is no entry in
the MySQL.user table for that user. The server will now use the
pluggable authentication to reference an outside authentication
service to determine the group. The connection will be established
with the USER() set to 'smith@host' and CURRENT_USER() set to
'programmer@%'. Please refer to
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/proxy-users.html for details.

New job as MySQL Community Manager, North America

As of today I am the MySQL Community Manager for North America. Part of the job description is work as part of a team that acts as the central resource and driving force for the design, process, manufacturing, test, quality and marketing of products(s) as they move from conception to distribution. So, you now have a focal point (me) to get your ideas into MySQL.

So help me gather and analyze information to define product specifications to move MySQL forward.

Calpont InfiniDB 2.0 and BI QuickStarts

The 2.0 release of Calpont InfiniDB
is ready for download. New features for the columnar database storage engine for MySQL include data compression, fully parallelized & scalable UDFs, and partition drop has been added to the automatic vertical & horizontal data partitioning.

Benefits of InfiniDB Enterprise 2.0
• 20-50% query performance improvement when reading from disk
• Distributed in-database calculations provide greater flexibility to the data analyst, and enable faster performance for deep analytics
• Removing obsolete data from the database quickly frees up disk storage and improves query response

And for those of you new to data warehousing and business intelligence, there are QuickStart for data reporting tools from Japersoft, BIRT, and Pentaho plus a guide for using Pentaho spoon with the Calpont Infinidb bulk loader.