Michal Hrušecký

Some of you may already notice, that in Build Service, there are already available rpms for new MySQL 5.1. Currently I think that in openSUSE 11.2 will be some 5.1 version of MySQL. So it may be interesting to tell our users what will change and how. Most of these changes are reflected in README.SuSE, but frankly - who reads READMEs?

Changes

Plugins

One of the new features in MySQL 5.1 is support for plugins. So some of the storage engines will be now shipped like that. Following plugins will be available:

• archive
• blackhole
• federated
• example

As you can see, InnoDB will be still compiled as internal part of MySQL. If you are upgrading from version 5.0.X or if this is your first installation of MySQL 5.1, all plugins will be enabled by default and you can disable them manually later (see manual). All these plugins are installed by main mysql rpm so you don't need to install anything special. And if you don't like them, you can disable them easily and completely

With this change you need to remove skip-federated option from your my.cnf file if you have changed it manually. This option was there by default in previous versions of MySQL. But if you are installing MySQL for the first time or if you didn't touch your configuration file, everything should be ok.

File locations

There are going to be some changes in files locations too. Most of them was made in default configuration file so if you are experiencing problems and you have made some manual adjustments to your /etc/my.cnf, try to merge this file with /etc/my.cnf.rpmnew.

First of them is that mysql socket file and pid file were moved by default from /var/lib/mysql to more reasonable location ( /var/run/mysql ). Second change is that mysql log file is again back in /var/log. These changes should make MySQL more LSB friendly and help people with their MySQL administration. All these changes can be reverted by changing MySQL configuration file so if you don't like it, you can move them anywhere you want

BerkeleyDB

Other important change is that MySQL no longer contains BerkeleyDB as storage engine. There is no fix for that and if you used it before, you have to migrate your data to different storage engine.

MySQL Upgrade Log

Last thing you may find useful is that if you missed messages displayed during automatic MySQL database upgrade, you can find them from now on in /var/log/mysql_upgrade.log.

Summary

Just summarization of what you can expect. You wouldn't be able to use BerkeleyDB any longer. And if you are experiencing any problems, it's probably because you changed your configuration manually so solution is to replace /etc/my.cnf by /etc/my.cnf.rpmnew

This is a first entry on my new blog. Maybe the first statement can be just "First post!!!", but I want to tell my potential readers why this blog was founded, what's its purpose and what you can hopefully find here in the future.

The original reason to create this blog was to have some place where I can post my ideas about my work. I'm currently working as a package maintainer in SuSE and sometimes I'm facing some things that I think people should know about. But who reads mailing lists nowadays? If I'll be good at blogging, I'll be googleable and therefore these idea may actually find some audience. Well, other thing is that my first goal is to get aggregated on Planet SuSE, once this site will be finished enough.

While I was thinking about this stuff, I realized that this may be a good opportunity to create some personal pages about myself too. Well, everyone wants a little bit of attention and I'll probably want to publish some personal stuff as well. Like photos from pubs and other social events. Maybe even my personal opinions about world around us. But that's probably distant future, so don't get scared

Main focus of this blog will be probably Linux and OpenSource in general. Most of it will be probably about my work - about OpenSUSE and it's tools, about MySQL I'm maintaining in OpenSUSE and maybe about some other packages. I'm also trying to participate in OpenSource software development whenever I have some free time, so you may expect some notes about that too.

So this is it - my first post here and I hope you will like my blog

...and I hope this isn't also the last post