maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Piotr Jurkiewicz <piotr.jerzy.jurkiewicz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello.

My name is Piotr Jurkiewicz. I am a last year MSc student at AGH 
University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland. I already 
contributed to MySQL InnoDB Memcached plugin. I know it well, from user 
and developer points of view.

I have been using MySQL InnoDB Memcached plugin since half year in a 
production system I administrate at my university. However, I must admit 
that quality of this plugin is rather poor. I have run several times 
into bugs, from the simple ones, like incorrect results of arithmetic 
operations, to the serious, like crashes of the whole MySQL process. I 
reported some of these bugs to Oracle and contributed patches fixing 
them [1] [2]. However, the more I was diving into the plugin code, the 
more I was realizing that the problem is not only buggy code and 
insufficient testing. The core mistakes had been made at the very 
beginning, when plugin architecture was set up. The most prominent 
result of these mistakes is lack of access security. After connecting to 
Memcached port, a user has access to all databases and tables exported 
by the plugin. Fixing this would require complete remodeling of plugin 
architecture and the way users configure and use it. This is not 
possible in MySQL, as it would break existing deployments.

Therefore, I was very excited, when I saw that porting of InnoDB 
Memcached plugin is among MariaDB proposed GSoC ideas. This gives a 
possibility to build the plugin in a proper way. During the last months 
I have been thinking a lot how this plugin should be structured. I think 
I worked out a clear concept of that. With the financing from Google I 
will be able to dedicate sufficient amount of time for its 
implementation, what should result in fully featured, secure and robust 
Memcached plugin for MariaDB.

You can review current version of my proposal in the Google Melange 
system: 
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/student/google/gsoc2015/piotrjurkiewicz/5743522325987328

As for now, it is only visible for MariaDB organization members, who are 
registered in Melange system. On March 27th, after student application 
deadline, I will make it visible for non-registered users as well and 
send its copy to this list.

I am waiting for your remarks and hints.

[1]: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=74874
[2]: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=75864

Piotr