I’m in the rather unfortunate position of having to migrate a client’s accumulated data from an old version of MySQL to the latest, and from old hardware to new, in a hosted environment where my only access is via a SQL client, with minimal down time.
Let’s ignore stored procedures, views, triggers etc. Those can be reproduced easy enough. It’s the tables containing millions of rows that will eat up the most time[1]. If you do a cursory check of the manuals and guides you’ll find that the normal approach is to use mysqldump to create a (massive, compressed) SQL file filled with table creation and row insertion operations. You then pump that dump file through a MySQL connection to [click title to read more…]
It took over an hour to figure this one out this morning. Setting up Drupal 6 on Windows 7 (instead of Linux, which would be my preferred platform but this time I’d no choice). Everything went smoothly until I got the White Screen Of Death (blank page) when I tried to launch the install.php. OK, probably screwed up the MySQL URL in settings.php. Nope. That’s the usual usr:pwd@localhost/db format, too simple to get wrong. Apache errors? Nope, nothing in the logs. Apache .htaccess or <Directory> options? Nope, I’m using familiar and well-tested boilerplate. And on it went down the diagnostics rat-hole.
Eventually I checked the MySQL session connections and there was no sign of anything inbound. Uh oh… Double check [click title to read more…]