The last time I consulted a customer, he came up to me beaming with joy and said that he had taken my advice and changed all the primary key columns from BIGINT (8 bytes) to INT (4 bytes) and that had made a big difference! His MySQL 8.4 database is now 750 Gbyte smaller (from 5.5 Tbyte). Nice!

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In our MariaDB advanced training courses, which we hold approximately every two months, we use machines that are directly exposed to the Internet with a public IP address. Warning: You should NEVER expose a database directly to the Internet without protection! Typically, it takes less than 72 hours (3 days) before we are exposed to the first external access attempts.

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