Dear Mr. Green, After struggling for several hours with installing an alternate installation of MySQL, I’ve concluded that this may be beyond my feeble powers but also that the official instructions are not very good. They are written for system administrators who are doing work of this kind all the time. I’m a scholar who has a reasonably firm command of SQL code but doesn’t work much at the command line. So you could say “tough luck” or you could try to be a little more explicit in the official instructions.
I work with a Mac, and as far as I can tell there isn’t much love lost between Apple and Oracle. And proper Linux users may think of Mac users as wimps. Which they may be. But they still want to use relational databases. It’s clear from Section 6.6 of the Reference manual that I need to make sure that the new installation differs from the old one with regard to the data directory, the port number, the socket, the shared memory-base-name, and the pid-file. It’s less clear to me where to change these setting. In the .dmg version of a Mac version, you can’t make any choices. I don’t know whether it’s a bug or a feature, but the button for customizing an installation doesn’t work. So the other option is the .tar file. There are a lot of files in that directory, but no file that draws attention to itself as the file where you make these changes. Some of the instructions are obscure to folks like me. What is a good port number? Will anything do, or is there a list somewhere? What do I call an alternate pid file? In documentation that would be friendlier, there might be a side-by side scenario, showing the values for the first installation, and possible alternate values for a second installation. And it would help to remind the user, who is not a systems administrator dealing with this stuff every day, where you find the relevant configuration files. It’s an odd feature of MySQL that it doesn’t seem to have an initial configuration file in the tar version of the program. So the question where to go in the first place is not obvious. Having failed to get it right, I tried a MySQL sandbox program that promised to do all this without trouble. Alas, it didn’t work on the Mac at all. Perhaps I should use SQLite, where you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. On the other hand , MySQL has very elegant and logically organized functions, and it’s a joy to work with once you have it actually installed an running. I’ll be grateful for any help. Martin Mueller Professor emeritus of English and Classics Northwestern University On 4/21/16, 5:42 PM, "shawn l.green" <shawn.l.gr...@oracle.com> wrote: On 4/20/2016 2:04 PM, Martin Mueller wrote: > > I am running MySQL 5.6.22 on an iMac as a desktop database. I would like to > install 5.7.12. Can I install it as a parallel and independent instance? And > if so, are there special problems to watch out for? > > > > > > Why would I want to do this? Well, I have a set of databases and tables on > the old installations that have grown over the years. Given the way I work, > the simplest thing would be install the new database and then work through my > existing tables over a number of weeks and transfer stuff as I go along. > That may not be very professional but it works for me, and it would let me > keep the old along the new, just in case something goes wrong/ > > My friends tell me to use sqlite, and they are probably right since file > management is so much simpler. But I find the many builtin functions of MySQL > very helpful and don't particularly want to learn a new set. > > Martin Mueller > Many systems have more than one mysqld running on them at the same time. To make them operate safely, you have to isolate them from each other using the guidance in this section of the manual: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/multiple-servers.html -- Shawn Green MySQL Senior Principal Technical Support Engineer Oracle USA, Inc. - Integrated Cloud Applications & Platform Services Office: Blountville, TN Become certified in MySQL! Visit https://www.mysql.com/certification/ for details. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql
