MySQL upgrade

I finally got sick of not being able to use SQL subqueries and decided to upgrade my MySQL installation from 4.0.x to 5.0.x.

I had wanted to do this previously but was afraid I’d end up breaking something and be left without a working development environment or a website either, for that matter, so I resorted to complicating my custom queries in CakePHP with JOIN statements :(

I couldn’t find a 5.0.x package for Slackware 10.0 in the package browser, so I bit the bullet and downloaded the source archive…

I extracted the files, issued the immortal ./configure && make commands, left things for a while and was pleasantly surprised when the compilation succeeded. removepkg got rid of the old package, a new one was easily produced using checkinstall and installpkg installed it for me.

The only problem I had was when I went to fire up the daemon and nothing happened. It turned out that the startup script was expecting mysqld_safe to be found in /usr/bin instead of /usr/local/bin where it had been installed to: that was quickly remedied with the creation of a symbolic link. From there it was plain sailing, all my databases were functional.

But enough techno-gibberish. The point of the matter is that I managed to build a package from source, get it up and running and the system as a whole still worked! Linux administration definitely appears to coming more natural to me. Bob be praised :)