Book Image

MariaDb Essentials

By : Kenler
Book Image

MariaDb Essentials

By: Kenler

Overview of this book

This book will take you through all the nitty-gritty parts of MariaDB, right from the creation of your database all the way to using MariaDB’s advanced features. At the very beginning, we show you the basics, that is, how to install MariaDB. Then, we walk you through the databases and tables of MariaDB, and introduce SQL in MariaDB. You will learn about all the features that have been added in MariaDB but are absent in MySQL. Moving on, you’ll learn to import and export data, views, virtual columns, and dynamic columns in MariaDB. Then, you’ll get to grips with full-text searches and queries in MariaDb. You’ll also be familiarized with the CONNECT storage engine. At the end of the book, you’ll be introduced to the community of MariaDB.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
9
Index

Upgrading MariaDB

If a package manager has been used to install MariaDB, the patch upgrades, like 10.0.12 to 10.0.13, are automatic. Each package manager supports a command to upgrade the packages, and will also take care to upgrade the dependencies if needed. If no package manager is used (for example, when we are working on Windows or if we have installed the generic Linux/UNIX binaries), we will need to manually uninstall and re-install MariaDB. This is also true for minor or major version upgrades such as 10.0 to 10.1. The following commands can be used with the package managers that have been used in this chapter:

  • With apt-get (Debian):
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get upgrade
    
  • With Yum (Red Hat):
    sudo yum update MariaDB-server MariaDB-client
    
  • With emerge (Gentoo):
    emerge -avDuN mariadb
    
  • With Homebrew (MacOS X):
    brew upgrade mariadb
    

Usually, we want the new version to read our old database. So, first we need to set up the data directory, which is the directory in which the databases are written by default. A common path is /var/mysql. To use this path, we will add the following line in the configuration file:

datadir=/var/mysql

This setting will not take effect until MariaDB is restarted.

At this point, we need to upgrade the format of our databases. Since the data has been written with an older release, some modifications to the files could be necessary before the new version of MariaDB can read it. For this purpose, MariaDB distributions include a tool called mysql_upgrade. This must be done even if a package manager has been used for upgrading MariaDB.

The mysql_upgrade tool must be run when the server is running. It reads the options from the configuration files. However, if the login credentials are not written in the configuration files, the typical invocation for mysql_upgrade is the following:

mysql_upgrade -u<user_name> -p<password>

Replace <user_name> with a valid username and <password> with the corresponding password.

After running mysql_upgrade, we will be able to work again without databases!