Friday, August 31, 2007

init_connect system variable

Even after working with MySQL for quite a long time, I sometimes stumble over great things that I didn't know. It happened to me again when I met Beat Vontobel (together with other MySQL folks like Giuseppe, Roland, Lenz, Susanne) at the FrosCon Conference.

What I learned about was the init_connect system variable. It allows to trigger a SQL statement (or Stored Procedure) whenever a new user that doesn't have SUPER privileges connects to the server. There's no need for me to explain this in large detail, since Beat already did this in one of his blog articles.

Why is it so useful for me? To keep db4free.net free from database accounts that aren't in use anymore, it's important to log the connects. So far I tried to do it with the general_log - but this of course also logs all the queries from the users ... which produces a huge amount of data that I don't really need for this purpose. Of course there are ways to filter that out, but since resources are limited, every way to avoid unnecessary data from the very beginning is of big help for me.

And since I never heard about it before - even though it is so useful - maybe there are others like me who could make use of it, but just haven't heard about it.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Early registration for MySQL UC ends this week (March 14th)!

Don't miss this date! March 14th is the last date to get a $200 discount for a MySQL Users Conference registration.



Watch out for the Tutorials, Sessions, Speakers and Events and take the opportunity to Get MySQL Certified during the Conference!



I'm looking forward to meeting you!

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

New db4free.net statistics

At the end of November, I activated Google Analytics to db4free.net, so now I have the data for a whole month which already shows some interesting facts about where the visitors come from, which browsers and operating system they use etc.

Very interesting is the Geo Map Overlay:

db4free.net Overlay Dec. 2006

This is based on 5,736 visitors. The total number of pageviews is 21,854.

2,831 visitors used the Internet Explorer - 2,210 of them version 6.0 and 601 used version 7.0, 20 used an older version.

2,303 visitors used Firefox - 1,454 used Firefox 2.0 and 742 used Firefox 1.5 (and the rest older versions).

434 visitors used Opera.

The use of operating systems splits up as follows: 5,402 visitors use Windows (4,929 of them Windows XP), 235 use Linux and 85 MacOS.

1,014 new users registered for a new account in December, which means that in average every 5th to 6th visitor creates a new account.

And last but not least - the number of total db4free.net users as of now according to my own statistics is 5,966 and the total number of visitors since its beginning is 73,182.

New MySQL related HowTo available

I just found this new HowTo at www.howtoforge.org:

http://www.howtoforge.org/secure_mysql_connection_ssh_tunnel

It describes how to set up a secure tunnel between your MySQL Server and a locally running MySQL Administrator using Putty. I haven't tried it out myself, but I strongly assume that this works for all the other GUI tools as well.