mssql

Updates March 2010 Edition

Posted on by David

This post is mainly going to be an update on what I am thinking and what I’ve been working on the past few weeks.

Work

At the beginning of this year, I took a new position (same company) in a security group. Our primary focus is to ensure that the company is shipping secure, OSS compliant, legally compliant code. However, my specific role in that is to develop tools (with Django) to help in making sure that happens. This is an exceptionally interesting project and involves pulling in vast amounts of data (terabytes) from many sources (multiple VCS, multiple databases) and presenting it in a comprehensive manner. This project and my work has led to some good problems:

Some of our databases are MSSql databases. This is a problem since we’re a Linux shop. Pyodbc works great for connecting to MSSql from Linux, but unfortunately, there are some incompatibilities with django-pyodbc. In addition, the project doesn’t seem to be that widely used so it isn’t supported or documented as well as it could be. We are considering sqlalchemy/elixir as well, but I’ve been able to patch up django-pyodbc to get it (mostly) working with the Django trunk. I also have some concerns about the django-pyodbc project as a whole. I’m considering working on this project pretty heavily.

Also, as part of my work, a coworker and I detailed a security flaw we found with urllib2. It resulted in basic authentication credentials being sent to sites that did not request it (and weren’t running SSL).

Future of RPC4Django

I have been considering moving RPC4Django from my personal subversion repository to Google Code or Github. I feel that there are a few advantages of this:

  • It is easier for others to contribute and get involved.
  • A public bug tracker that would let other people easily raise issues instead of emailing me directly. This way we have public archives and the information can be found by anyone interested in RPC4Django.
  • If I were hit by a bus, some one could easily take it over

I might make a mailing list as well. Are there any strong opinions on this?