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 before. Working on the code becomes …

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
• …

After last week’s post about bloggin trends, this week I will go through the most active bloggers over the years as well as particularly for 2010.

What is the range of time analysed here?

mysql >  select min(date_time), max(date_time) from blogs;
+---------------------+---------------------+
| min(date_time)      | max(date_time)      |
+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2004-03-04 19:47:00 | 2011-01-07 13:22:00 |
+---------------------+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.04 sec)

How many blog posts in the above period (almost 7years)?

mysql >  select count(*) from blogs;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|    21698 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

How many authors have contributed to planetmysql?

mysql >  select count(distinct(author)) from blogs; …

Phew, here we go, this blog post has been long time coming! A few months ago I started toying around with the idea of analyzing the PlanetMySQL public blog feed. It doesn’t take long to extract the data and prepare it for analysis but between lots of work and procrastination this blog post was left unfinished.

It was partly out of pure curiosity and partly the fact that it seemed to me there were less posts than previous years that I decided to trend out the number of posts over the past years and here we go.

The blue line shows the blog posts per month over the past six years and the black line is a polynomial trend line. There are a few points of interest which are visible and I’ll be listing here (to all their understanding):
1. The first thing which struck me negatively is …

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 …

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 …