Gallery

Storage facilities

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 15:33

Jon Honeyball makes the most of tumbling prices by ordering a tower of storage, and David Moss continues setting up a course management system.

Now you have to choose the database type and, again, there are three options: Multifunctional Database, Transactional Database Only and Non-Transactional Database Only. Choose Multifunctional to use both the fast transactional InnoDB storage engine and the high-speed MyISAM storage engine, a general-purpose option. The Transactional option is optimised for application servers and transactional web applications, and uses the InnoDB engine, although you can still use the MyISAM engine if you need to. The third, Non-Transactional option uses only the MyISAM engine and is aimed at simple web applications, analysis, logging and monitoring programs. I went for the Multifunctional Database option, since I felt it gave me the greatest flexibility for experimenting.

Next choose the installation location for the InnoDB Tablespace and hit Next. Once again you're presented with three choices, this time to indicate the number of concurrent connections you expect. The choices are Decision Support (DSS)/OLAP, which assumes roughly 20 concurrent connections; Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), which can handle 500 concurrent connections; or Manual Setting, in which you decide how many concurrent connections you're going to have. Your choice here will largely be dictated by the database type you opted for earlier, and I went for Decision Support.

The next screen has two checkboxes, one that lets you choose the port you're going to use. You may recall that last month I configured my server to use port 3306 - the default - so I just left the option to configure an exception in the firewall unchecked, but you should check it if you'd like the wizard to do it for you. I also left the "Enable Strict Mode" checkbox selected, as I couldn't think of any good reason to uncheck it: its job is to make the server behave like a traditional database server and, since I like traditions, I hit Next again.

Guess what? Yes, indeed, three more options. This time Character Sets, which you can choose from "Standard Character Set" (Latin 1, that is, plain English); "Best support for Multilingualism" (UTF8 - pick this if you're going to be storing text in multiple languages); and "Manual Selected Default Character Set/Collation", which offers you a dropdown that reveals a truly massive list of character sets to choose from. I went for the multilingual option, as I'd be storing text in a variety of languages.

I then hit Next and left the checkbox enabled that installs the MySQL Server as a Windows Service and I also opted to have it start automatically. Below that there's an unchecked checkbox labelled, "Include Bin Directory in Windows PATH", and enabling lets you use the command line to access the server/client executable files, so I went for it.

Now hit Next, and set up a root password. There's an option here to enable remote access to the root directory: leave that alone unless you know you'll need to; I did. There's also an option to create an anonymous account and I ignored that. Hit Next and leap for joy, as you've reached the final screen, so all you have to do now is hit Execute and let the installer strut its stuff. The last thing to do once the installer has finished is make a change to the php.ini file so that it can chat to your shiny new MySQL Server installation. As you may recall from last month, most of the configuration in this particular ini file is done by un-commenting lines that already exist, and this is no exception. Open it in a text editor and uncomment the following lines (the first two of which you might have already done last month):