When upgrading from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 on the machine on which the Lyceum blog, Lyceum demo installation, Lyceum wiki, and teachfor.us are hosted, I came across some serious problems. The MySQL daemon would quit unexpectedly, seemingly whenever a query from the demo installation was made, but not any other queries. We checked everything and hunted around the logs and couldn’t come up with anything, so I filed a bug with MySQL. The geekier of my readers may be interested in skimming through it.
The day after I filed the ticket, Heikki Tuuri, the creator and maintainer of InnoDB, was on the case. He and Valeriy Kravchuk let me know how I could provide them with as much information as possible for them to use to debug the problem. Eventually I ran a table optimize, and that fixed the problem. Also, over at ibiblio, we discovered that /var had been at 100% when I was doing an application upgrade (not the DB upgrade), so I figured that might be part of the problem as well; the index got currupted when being rebuilt.
In spite of my findings, at the end of the the thread, I was informed by Valeriy that because of the datatypes in my table, the only way to do a proper upgrade was to dump the table and then reload it after the upgrade, and she directed me to this document. I don’t know if other folks at ibiblio who were working on the upgrade had read this, but I know I hadn’t.
So I’m pleased with the responsiveness and community of the developers of MySQL, and I hang my head in shame for not having RTFM.
you have shamed your family name