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Re: Can't get MySQL 5.5 to install on Windows 7
Posted by: Chris Besant
Date: December 19, 2010 10:25AM

Good to hear you got it working, Kerry. I get a giggle out of your implications as to the general help of this forum. Didn't you find the advice from the other gentleman that you should never modify the MySQL system tables to be helpful?

:-))

Beware that if you changed the mysql.user.authentication_string column back to NOT NULL, you may experience issues with existing software developed against older versions of MySQL. I checked into a couple of my production MySQL 5.1.x installations, and they do not have the authentication_string column in the mysql.user table. The fact that this is a new column, that it is marked NOT NULL, and that it has no default value, means that any software that directly adds users to the database is likely to bomb with the same error.

I suspect this will cause all kinds of hell with users of phpMyAdmin! Since that is such a prevalent application for people managing MySQL on Internet hosting servers, I am sure this is not the last the Internet will hear of this issue. IMO, a really short sighted decision to add that authentication_string column to the user table, particularly as a text type in a server that doesn't support default values for text columns!

Another issue with the installation of 5.5 is that while the installer does prompt you for a data directory so you can set the data directory to other than the default, it managed to not configure my.ini to use that other data directory, and it still put the various system files into the shared data directory
( %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\data, A.K.A.: C:\Users\All Users\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\data under Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.)

I generally put the data for various versions of MySQL into separate directories on a RAID volume other than the boot volume, in a directory named with the MySQL server version, so I caught that one pretty quick. If you use the default directories, and they change the InnoDB logfile size in my.ini in a future release, you may experience the issue where the mysqld service will fail to start. That happens because it finds an old copy of the ib_logfile0 log file in the shared data directory (which the uninstall does not clean out.)

I highly recommend that you make a separate directory somewhere, shut down the MySQL service, copy the contents of C:\Users\AllUsers\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5 to that new directory, edit the my.ini to point the datadir= variable to it in the [mysql] section, and restart the service. The setup wizard used to handle this for a person, but doesn't work right anymore, at least the way I ran it.

One final warning if you'd been working with MySQL 5.5 release candidates: they've flip-flopped the default value of the innodb_file_per_table system variable. It defaulted to OFF (0) in MySQL 5.1.x, with the 5.5 RC versions, it defaulted to ON (1). With 5.5.8, they switched it back to defaulting to OFF.

I've found that things are easier to support and more robust in server failure situations when there are large tables if innodb_file_per_table is enabled.

-- Chris

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Re: Can't get MySQL 5.5 to install on Windows 7
December 19, 2010 10:25AM


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