Wednesday, April 10, 2024

17 Years of Insecure MySQL Client !

Yes, this is a catchy title, but it is true, and it got you reading this post :-).  Another title could have been “Please load this mysql-dump: what could go wrong ?”.  As you guessed, loading a dump is not a risk-free operation.  In this post, I explain how the insecure MySQL client makes this operation risky and how to protect against it.

And if you think this post is not worth reading because you do not load dumps, consider the similarity with running any untrusted SQL scripts.  You might be doing this more often than you think (have you ever had to run a script to prepare MySQL for an upgrade of WordPress, Grafana, or any other software: these are untrusted SQL scripts).

Thursday, April 4, 2024

dbdeployer Tutorial on Mac

Not very long ago (well, maybe a little longer, this post is in draft for more than a year), in the spawn of less than 5 days, I suggested many colleagues to reproduce a problem they had with MySQL in a "more simple environment".  Such more simple environment can be created with dbdeployer.  dbdeployer is a tool to create "MySQL Sandboxes" on a Mac (laptop or desktop) or on Linux (vm, laptop or desktop).  It is relatively simple to use, but if you do not know what to do, getting things set up the first time can be challenging.  The goal of this post is to ease this first setup.  In this tutorial, I describe how to install dbdeployer on a Mac and how to create your first sandboxes.  I might do a Linux tutorial in the future.