If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

(Though I can’t guarantee you’ll see numbers like that).

All the old charts are still available in more or less the same form.  And we’re hoping to explore some of the new possibilities Open Flash Chart has to offer – so keep an eye on your stats.  Like we had to ask.

And in case you missed it: yes, blog stats now work in your time zone.

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While at the MySQL Conference, I caught up with Barry Abrahamson, the systems wrangler/de-facto DBA behind Wordpress.com (and all other Automattic properties). Watch the video.

You probably already know that Wordpress itself is built on top of MySQL. And despite everything you might have heard about our (MySQL/Sun’s) new founders, Wordpress is MySQL today, and for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I digress.

Wordpress.com has about 70 million tables, and tens of thousands of blogs. Large amount of tables, serve for easy sharding - …