db4free optimizations

Today I did some server optimizations on db4free.net, which has recently welcomed its 1,500th user. As I already wrote earlier in my weblog, I'm currently preparing for the MySQL professional exam, and I could use the new skills from learning for this exams immediately for re-configuring the db4free.net server to offer better performence to its users. I enabled the query cache, extended the buffer limits, allowed more concurrent users and enlarged the max_allowed_packet value to make it possible to import larger dump files.

But there are more benefits from learning for MySQL certification exams than that. For example, before I started, I used to create tables and users, or change user's permissions with 3rd party tools like phpMyAdmin. I knew the fundamental statements how to do it with SQL, but I didn't know the details good enough to really use it. Today, I feel even more (!) comfortable to do it in MySQL monitor using SQL than with any graphical tool. So this proofs that the exams helped me a lot to become much better in writing SQL and to be independent of any 3rd party software.

Stay steady as one of the next articles in my weblog will be to show, how the different transaction isolation levels work in practice and how a deadlock can be created artificially. Very interesting stuff, indeed!

But now back to db4free. As already mentioned, db4free has hit the 1,500 users mark. Time for some statistics. As of today, there are 1,575 users from 60 different countries. The website has been visited 9,415 times from people from 91 different countries. Most visitors (and also users) come from Germany, followed by China, USA, Taiwan, Poland, Austria and Hongkong (as it's easy to see, db4free is very popular in the Far East region). After Germany (339), most users come from Poland (259), China (192), Taiwan (166), Hongkong (160) and the USA (98).

Information schema allowed me to get some more interesting statistical data. The 1,575 users have created 22,445 tables, from which are 21,894 MyISAM tables, 470 InnoDB tables, 80 MEMORY tables and (as db4free is offering the Max version of MySQL 5.0.15) 1 BerkeleyDB table. There are 13 views, 23 Stored Procedures and 28 User Defined Functions.