Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Does the INSTALL.mysql file tell all?

[Steve W. <sw...@pa...>]

Hi Marjorie, sorry for the delay. I've been watching TV a lot lately and
waiting to hear from friends, and I finally have and they are all OK. (I
live in Manhattan).

On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Marjorie Roswell wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I spent a gazillion hours, as a frustrated sort-of newbie, unable to
> create the mysql database.
>
> Seems to me that the directions should add "CREATE" permissions along
> with the select, insert, update, and delete that are provided in the
> INSTALL.mysql.
>
> Am I right about that?

You may be right... read on:

> Even when I tried to update my username with these permissions, my
> grant statement didn't work (for hours, and hours of trying every
> which possibility.) I think I might've gotten it, though I finally
> ended up with the lovely username "testnew."
>
> I have a lot of questions, etc, but this is just an ode to how hard it
> is not be an expert in something. Things that are completely trivial
> to an expert can take hours and hours, or days, or weeks, for a
> newbie...

I share your pain. Postgresql and Mysql are notoriously difficult to set
up and administrate. And they both do it in totally different ways. I know
once I have one or the other set up it's a long time before I have to do
it again and by then I've forgotten, and it takes at least an evening to
do it over. I hate it.


> The neighbor says that everything2 is cooler than phpwiki, by the way.
> Any thoughts on that? This somehow seemed more manageable to me
> (notwithstanding the last 7 hours!).

everything2, from my limited exposure to it, is very very different from a
Wiki. I don't think you can edit the existing content, only add new ones
(thus an append-only kind of information repostitory). However I almost
guarantee you it runs on Mysql, which as we all know is the source of a
lot of Slashdot's problems ;-)

So is it better for you? Depends on what you are doing.


> What is the real benefit of moving the phpwiki to mysql, anyhow? Will
> it be faster than the default DBM system?

To answer that might start a holy war ;-)

But to be short and fair, there are advantages and disadvantages to all
three types (you left out flat file, which you might want to try).

RDBMS (mysql, pgsql etc): data integrity, data manipulation through a 4G
language (SQL), a simple interface to access the database through (its
API), portability, lots more. But it can be hard to set up and
administrate. This forms a large barrier to entry for a lot of people.

DBM (gdbm, ndbm, sdmb etc) are available on most Unix systems, Linux in
particular, so it was a good choice for the default database. However in
order to have the same set of features as we have for the Mysql version,
we have to write a lot more code to manipulate the data.

Flat file: This might be a better choice in the future for the default
setup, since we can probably get away with creating a directory in /tmp.
It will require even more coding than DBM though. Not a lot more maybe,
but still more. I don't know how portable the code would be (did I just
say that? I never used to care if it ran on Windows systems ;-)


> Margie-near-midnight, and smart enough to know that I should wait
> until a different day to try to actually upgrade my wiki, for fear of
> losing it all.

As always, backup, backup, backup. Don't upgrade your existing Wiki
either; set up a whole new one, with Mysql, then port the content over via
zip file. We'll tell you how to do that when you are ready. I think it's
also documented in the config.php file.

cheers
~swain

---
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