Category Archives: db4free.net

Blog posts related to db4free.net

db4free.net’s 5th birthday

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 %, so more than every fifth visit ends in signing up for a new database. Which means, that about between 110,000 and 120,000 database accounts (meaning database and user) have ever been created. There have been some cleanups since then to make resources available to people who actively use their databases. Which is why the current number of databases is much lower, at slightly above 13,400.

Today I must (also) admit that the code behind db4free.net’s web application was initially quite poor and it stayed poor for quite long. Why it was poor from my today’s point of view is probably due to my learning process in these 5 years. This year I did a lot of cleanup on the code behind db4free.net’s web application and removed a few bottlenecks which often made the website painfully slow. Now it’s in a fairly reasonable state again, and I have some ideas in the back of my head how to further improve it. So db4free.net is far from its end of life. Quite the opposite is the case, it’s time to give it a new boost so that the balance after its 10th anniversary is even more impressive than today’s 5 year balance.

db4free.net blog has moved and what’s new

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:

… so far, not much new and most posts which go into one category will go into the other as well.

Further categories that I’m thinking of are:

If you had my old blog bookmarked or had linked to it on your blog or site, please add or update the bookmark or link to my new blog. And if you have not done so far, why not do so now?

Welcome to my new home!