As most people still do I learned to read using books. WhooHoo! Books are nice. Besides reading them they are also a nice decoration on your shelf. There is a brilliant TED talk by Chip Kidd on this subject. But sometimes books have drawbacks. This is where I have to start the comparison with vinyl records (Yes, you're still reading a database oriented blog). Vinyl records look nice and are still being sold and yes I also still use them. The drawback is that car dealers start to look puzzeled if you ask them if your new multimedia system in your car is able to play your old Led Zeppelin records. The market for portable record players is small, and that's for a good reason. The problem with books about databases is that they get old very soon. The MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide was printed by lulu.com which made it possible to quickly update the material. This made sure that the material wasn't outdated when you bought it. I like to use books as refere...

Last Friday the Dutch TV program Zembla aired part two of the "verzuimpolitie" series. The first part was mainly about how employers could access medical information about employees. There is a news article about the second part here (with google translate). The second part is about the security of the IT system which is used to record medical information about employees. They give this information to the company to which the company they're working for is outsourcing everything related to workplace absenteeism. After the first part of the series some viewer reported that the website contained SQL injections. The creators of the program verified this and tried to report it to VCD (The company which offers the software as a service). Then VCD called to police to remove them from the VCD office. Then Zembla contacted the Radboud University and asked them to assist with this issue. The University verified the SQL Injection and confirmed that this was a serious sec...

Today I tried to make incremental backups of a MariaDB instance in a MySQL sandbox with Percona XtraBackup. I used the recently released XtraBackup 2.0. And of course there is documentation about making incremental backups.  MySQL sandbox makes it easy to run many different MySQL versions on one machine. It does this by changing the port number, data directory, UNIX socket location and a whole lot more. So I first started with a full backup and after that I used that backup as a base for the incremental backups. To do that I had to specify the port number which is 5522 and the username and password for the msandbox account. As MySQL uses a UNIX socket instead of a TCP connection if the hostname is localhost I specified 127.0.0.1 as hostname to force a TCP connection. That worked! Then I created the incremental backup by using the --incremental option and the --incremental-basedir option to specify the location of the full backup. That also worked! Then I tried to make a ba...

There is a nice demo of  MySQL Bug 13510739 on Eric Romang's blog I've published this blog to make this content available on planet.mysql.com.