db4free.net‘s server has reached its limits, and it was time for a new one. Now here it is, a shiny new server, with 8 times as much memory than the previous one, and also more disk space. Time for a reboot.

Only recently, MySQL 5.6 has become GA with much better performance than 5.5 and earlier, so the combination of a faster MySQL server and a faster machine should result in a very significant performance boost for db4free.net.

I have not migrated any user databases, but they are still available on the previous/old server. The old server is available at db4free.org, the new server at db4free.net. I will leave the old server running until end of March to allow users to transfer their data to

In my role as Web Developer for mysql.com (http://www.mysql.com) I have always tried to advocate open web standards, and to adopt good new web technologies as early as possible. And I believe that an open source product like MySQL owes the World Wide Web open web technologies, rather than content which requires proprietary plugins. Which is why it’s a pleasure for me to tell you that demo videos which used to require Flash have been replaced by new demo videos which work with HTML5 video (and using Flash only as fallback for old browsers).

Take a look:

… or even better, take a look at the real thing

db4free.net is joining the protest against SOPA & PIPA and will stay down for 24 hours, starting January 18, 2012 at 02:00 UTC.

Learn more on what this is all about at americancensorship.org …

… and why the WEB GOES ON STRIKE …

… or watch some of the many videos related to SOPA on YouTube.

db4free.net has been updated again.

The server now runs MySQL 5.6.4 m7, the very latest, and lets hope, the very greatest.

Enjoy!

On May 17, 2006 – exactly 5 years ago – I started my new job as web developer at MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) AB.

Since then I closed 3,049 web requests, worked with 9 colleagues in the web team, had 4 direct managers, attended the MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara, CA 4 times (2006-2009, although in 2006 I wasn’t an employee yet, but that was when I got hired, so lets count it) and one all-company meeting in Orlando, FL and went through 2 acquisitions: in 2008 to Sun Microsystems and in 2010 to Oracle.

Time to say thank you to all the great people who I had the pleasure to work with during these 5 years!

Recently there were some server issues at db4free.net which raised some concerns over a possible soon end of db4free.net.

Here are 3 facts that should convince you that there is no reason for concern:

• db4free.net has doubled (!) its visit numbers in quite a short period of time. And this doesn’t look like a temporary increase, but very likely to continue and maybe even become more. So db4free.net is currently more successful than it has ever been before.
• db4free.net recently moved to a new server, which is even slightly stronger than the old one, but costs less than half the money.
• I invested quite some efforts to clean up the web site infrastructure (which was in a very messy state not long ago). Even though this isn’t entirely finished yet, it allows for new perspectives which seemed unrealistic

A few months ago I wrote about how to do language detection correctly, to respect the user’s preferred language setting in his/her browser, aka the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header.

Now, finally, db4free.net has received exactly this implementation. Took me a while, but now it’s there .

Especially German speaking people will notice the difference. If German takes priority over English in the browser settings, the German version of db4free.net will be loaded by default. No more need to click the German flag. If neither German nor English is set, the site will default to English.

However, the English and German flags are still available, to change the language if a person chooses to. This allows for maximum flexibility.

Sorry for the hiccups of the PlanetMySQL RSS feed.

The problem has been identified and is now fixed. Everybody subscribed to the feed should now be getting updates again .

Noticed the new navigation item in the MySQL Developer Zone?

Sarah Novotny and Sheeri K. Cabral have picked up the OurSQL Podcasts again which were on hiatus for a while (well, they have now been back again for a while as well). The Podcasts are available on several resources:

• The OurSQL Podcasts page
• Technocation, Inc.
• iTunes

Today, December 15, 2010, MySQL 5.5.8 was released – and is now generally available.

db4free.net has been updated to 5.5.8 GA.

Read the Introduction to MySQL 5.5 to find out what’s new and … give it a try!

One month ago I set up a new MySQL 5.5 db4free.net server instance, after the old instance started to keep crashing. Since then, the former user database server has run on port 3307 to give people a chance to rescue their data, while the new MySQL 5.5 instance started completely from scratch.

However, most of the time, the 3307 server was down and I doubt that many people had a chance to get a copy/backup of their data. Now I updated that server to MySQL 5.5 as well. It’s too early to tell whether or not that will increase people’s chances, but it may be worth to give it a new try.

Disaster struck again. Well, it’s actually not really a disaster. db4free.net is a testing environment and people are not supposed to use it for any important data, or to use it in production. When after the last server update the main server instance started crashing, it was one of these circumstances which I can’t guarantee my users not to happen, and since both my budget and the server resources are low, I can’t afford setting up a backup system which allows me to restore everything just as a commercial database provider can (or should be able to) do.

Unfortunately I received a few emails (sorry that I couldn’t answer all of them directly) which made me believe that this fact isn’t obvious to all users. Even though the Conditions of Use pretty much explain that, not everybody obviously reads them. Which is why I added this text to both the

Recently I wrote about detecting the preferred language or locale of a web site visitor, using Zend Framework.

Well, I have to start with one correction. In my last blog post about this topic I talked about the User Agent String, but since I wrote the article, I figured out that the User Agent String doesn’t play any role at all. Neither in the Zend Framework variant that I blogged about earlier, nor in today’s code. And that is good so, because both Internet Explorer and

To my shame I must admit, I missed it. It happened on June 29, 2005 when db4free.net was first available to the public. At that time it was running MySQL 5.0.7 beta. Quite a lot has happened since then, MySQL 5.0 made its way up to 5.0.91 and the current MySQL GA version is 5.1.49, which is also the version db4free.net is running as of today. The first phpMyAdmin version that db4free.net was offering to provide easy access to the user’s databases was 2.6.3. Today I updated phpMyAdmin to 3.3.5.

Statistics are not necessarily 100 % accurate, but here is the best I can come up with. Since its launch, db4free.net had 528,900 visits. The ratio registrations per visits is at about 22 %,

Sometimes I find Google annoying. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of the many Google haters out there. They have done amazing things and especially since they have released WebM as Open Source and royalty free video format, they have earned a bonus in my attitude towards them. And even though Google Chrome is not my personal favorite, I have to admit that Chrome has brought a great momentum into the development of web browsers (and therefor the WWW as a whole) which users of any browser benefit from. Last but not least, I use a lot of Google’s services and they do their job quite well. So all in all, Google’s record from my point of view is pretty good.

But one thing really sucks. I use an English operating system. I use an English Firefox (locale

It was about time to switch to something new.

I finally have my new blog launched at www.mpopp.net which is something that I had planned for quite a while. This new blog is a replacement for my old blog at db4free.blogspot.com where people will find news and posts about db4free.net and MySQL. But since db4free.blogspot.com used to be specific to db4free.net and MySQL (implied by its name), it was not a good place to blog about various different topics as well, which I found increasingly limiting. So I decided for a new blog, run by WordPress, which will allow me to categorize my blog posts to target people who are interested in specific topics.

Some of them will be:

Hello from Santa Clara, California! I've arrived here yesterday and am staying with Giuseppe and Jan in the same hotel. Currently, the weather isn't that nice and we're all busy making preparations for the upcoming MySQL conference next week.

I'm fiddling with my slide deck for my talk about "A look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest", realizing that there is such a wealth of great tools that it's unlikely to cover them all in a 45-minute session. But I hope it will give the audience some inspiration about what tools to take a closer look at!

On a related note, I've just reconfigured Planet

This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an

Well, let me cut right to the chase. You can finally search the archives of PlanetMySQL. Yes, just go to the sidebar, enter your query and off you go. Yes, it is using a MySQL fulltext search index, and why not, we are MySQL after all ;) The search is happening in Boolean Mode so all the operators and expectations for doing such a search will help you find whatever you are looking for.

But Wait...! There's a bit more than that.

You might notice under each post title there's a new row of words.

We've been importing the tags you place on your posts for years, we just never did anything with them. So what can you do?

* You can see how people tagged their

My colleague Lenz might have forgotten to post before he disappeared on a well-deserved vacation but we've enabled Russian as a choice in PlanetMySQL. Feel free to start submitting your Russian language blogs.

Russian Language PlanetMySQL: http://ru.planet.mysql.com
New feed submissions: http://ru.planet.mysql.com/new

We haven't completely translated all the strings yet (that's my fault, I need to stringify the vote stuff) but we're getting there!

(EDIT: LenZ is not on vacation... in fact he is at PHPDay2009 in Verona, Italy... sorry LenZ)

Just before the MySQL User Conference, Dups implemented a small little feature for Planet MySQL: “voting”. We wanted to see what a voting system might mean to you, our PlanetMySQL readers.

The question is now how to improve the voting mechanism to make it more useful. The goal is for everyone to see what you and your peers think are the best PlanetMySQL entries over a given week.

Here are some of the options:

1. Open up voting to everyone regardless of whether they are logged in or not. Currently you can only vote if you are logged in with a MySQL.com account. Let’s face it, a login gives a barrier to entry even as

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.