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 registration form and to the registration email, so that it leaves no doubt that every …

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 …

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:

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