MySQL Upgrade

  This morning I was doing some work on the PocoTag project. This is the "evolution" of the old PocoPay project. Basically PayPal's introduction of mobile payments did not seem to bode well for PocoPay, so we have a new business plan.

    A big part of the new plan is to provide anonymous email redirection, kind of similar to craigslist. For this I installed Apache James as our email server. I thought I might need to write one of its mailet apps, but it turns out it bundles several mailets including one that does email redirection based on aliases in a DB table. That was almost perfect. Only problem was that we were not storing the alias and "real" email addresses in the same table. I figured that was easy to solve by simply creating a database view.

    Then I remembered that database views were introduced in MySQL 5. We were running MySQL 4.1 for PocoPay/PocoTag, so now views. That meant it was time to upgrade. I read through some of the MySQL documentation, and it claimed that the Windows installer could seamlessly upgrade from 4.1.5+ to 5.0+. We were running 4.1.12, thus I thought the installer was going to make my life easy.

    Turns out I (or the documentation) was wrong. The installer made no interaction with the MySQL 4.1.12, and tried to do a parallel install of 5.0 instead of an upgrade. So I shutdown 4.1.12 manually and backed up its data directory. Then I uninstalled MySQL 4.1.12 (and uninstalled the 5.0 that was installed, though not configured.) I re-installed 5.0 and dropped in my data, and ... voila! Everything worked perfectly. I created my database view just as I wanted. Next I will configure James, enabling its JDBC Alias mailet with the my new view, and PocoTag should be ready to provide anonymous email redirection.

technorati tags:mysql, apache james, mailet, pocotag

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