Keeping It Simple

I’ve created a patch for MySQL 5.0.33 to provide a function SHA2().Download it here: http://www.karwin.com/sha2.patch.gz It really just calls out to the OpenSSL library for the digest functions. So you have to build MySQL from source with OpenSSL support enabled. You can use the function in SQL syntax like: SELECT SHA2(‘message’, 256); The second argument…

Bob Field posted his reactions to the recent MySQL announcement to offer two versions of the MySQL Server product: Enterprise Server and Community Server. I feel somewhat similarly; the change has the potential to give greater value to both the corporate customers of MySQL and their community users. It will be interesting to see how…

People frequently ask if they can do fancy things in triggers, such as writing to the filesystem, sending an email, or notifying other applications of data changes. I always recommend against doing things like this. Calling an external processes from a trigger or UDF is very difficult to get right, and it is very easy…

Several months ago, it became clear that one could crack a SHA-1 message digest. It was still a nontrivial problem, but it could be done thousands of times faster than brute-force guessing. So SHA-1 has become undesirable as a secure message digest, and U.S. federal software security standards now call for software to use SHA-256…