MySQL and Solaris

Abstract

This is the MySQL Solaris extract from the MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual.

For legal information, see the Legal Notices.

For help with using MySQL, please visit either the MySQL Forums or MySQL Mailing Lists, where you can discuss your issues with other MySQL users.

For additional documentation on MySQL products, including translations of the documentation into other languages, and downloadable versions in variety of formats, including HTML and PDF formats, see the MySQL Documentation Library.

Licensing information—MySQL 5.1.  This product may include third-party software, used under license. If you are using a Commercial release of MySQL 5.1, see this document for licensing information, including licensing information relating to third-party software that may be included in this Commercial release. If you are using a Community release of MySQL 5.1, see this document for licensing information, including licensing information relating to third-party software that may be included in this Community release.

Licensing information—MySQL Cluster.  This product may include third-party software, used under license. If you are using a Commercial release of MySQL Cluster, see this document for licensing information, including licensing information relating to third-party software that may be included in this Commercial release. If you are using a Community release of MySQL Cluster, see this document for licensing information, including licensing information relating to third-party software that may be included in this Community release.

Document generated on: 2016-08-12 (revision: 48536)

Preface and Legal Notices

This is the MySQL Solaris extract from the MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual.

Legal Notices

Copyright © 1997, 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.

The information contained herein is subject to change without notice and is not warranted to be error-free. If you find any errors, please report them to us in writing.

If this is software or related documentation that is delivered to the U.S. Government or anyone licensing it on behalf of the U.S. Government, then the following notice is applicable:

U.S. GOVERNMENT END USERS: Oracle programs, including any operating system, integrated software, any programs installed on the hardware, and/or documentation, delivered to U.S. Government end users are "commercial computer software" pursuant to the applicable Federal Acquisition Regulation and agency-specific supplemental regulations. As such, use, duplication, disclosure, modification, and adaptation of the programs, including any operating system, integrated software, any programs installed on the hardware, and/or documentation, shall be subject to license terms and license restrictions applicable to the programs. No other rights are granted to the U.S. Government.

This software or hardware is developed for general use in a variety of information management applications. It is not developed or intended for use in any inherently dangerous applications, including applications that may create a risk of personal injury. If you use this software or hardware in dangerous applications, then you shall be responsible to take all appropriate fail-safe, backup, redundancy, and other measures to ensure its safe use. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates disclaim any liability for any damages caused by use of this software or hardware in dangerous applications.

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

This software or hardware and documentation may provide access to or information about content, products, and services from third parties. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates are not responsible for and expressly disclaim all warranties of any kind with respect to third-party content, products, and services unless otherwise set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates will not be responsible for any loss, costs, or damages incurred due to your access to or use of third-party content, products, or services, except as set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle.

Documentation Accessibility

For information about Oracle's commitment to accessibility, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program website at http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=docacc.

Access to Oracle Support

Oracle customers that have purchased support have access to electronic support through My Oracle Support. For information, visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=info or visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=trs if you are hearing impaired.

This documentation is NOT distributed under a GPL license. Use of this documentation is subject to the following terms:

You may create a printed copy of this documentation solely for your own personal use. Conversion to other formats is allowed as long as the actual content is not altered or edited in any way. You shall not publish or distribute this documentation in any form or on any media, except if you distribute the documentation in a manner similar to how Oracle disseminates it (that is, electronically for download on a Web site with the software) or on a CD-ROM or similar medium, provided however that the documentation is disseminated together with the software on the same medium. Any other use, such as any dissemination of printed copies or use of this documentation, in whole or in part, in another publication, requires the prior written consent from an authorized representative of Oracle. Oracle and/or its affiliates reserve any and all rights to this documentation not expressly granted above.

Chapter 1 Installing MySQL on Unix/Linux Using Generic Binaries

Oracle provides a set of binary distributions of MySQL. These include generic binary distributions in the form of compressed tar files (files with a .tar.gz extension) for a number of platforms, and binaries in platform-specific package formats for selected platforms.

This section covers the installation of MySQL from a compressed tar file binary distribution. For other platform-specific package formats, see the other platform-specific sections. For example, for Windows distributions, see Installing MySQL on Microsoft Windows.

To obtain MySQL, see How to Get MySQL.

MySQL compressed tar file binary distributions have names of the form mysql-VERSION-OS.tar.gz, where VERSION is a number (for example, 5.1.73), and OS indicates the type of operating system for which the distribution is intended (for example, pc-linux-i686 or winx64).

Warning

If you have previously installed MySQL using your operating system native package management system, such as yum or apt-get, you may experience problems installing using a native binary. Make sure your previous MySQL installation has been removed entirely (using your package management system), and that any additional files, such as old versions of your data files, have also been removed. You should also check for configuration files such as /etc/my.cnf or the /etc/mysql directory and delete them.

If you run into problems and need to file a bug report, please use the instructions in How to Report Bugs or Problems.

On Unix, to install a compressed tar file binary distribution, unpack it at the installation location you choose (typically /usr/local/mysql). This creates the directories shown in the following table.

Table 1.1 MySQL Installation Layout for Generic Unix/Linux Binary Package

Directory | Contents of Directory
bin, scripts | mysqld server, client and utility programs
data | Log files, databases
docs | MySQL manual in Info format
man | Unix manual pages
include | Include (header) files
lib | Libraries
share | Miscellaneous support files, including error messages, sample configuration files, SQL for database installation
sql-bench | Benchmarks

Debug versions of the mysqld binary are available as mysqld-debug. To compile your own debug version of MySQL from a source distribution, use the appropriate configuration options to enable debugging support. See Installing MySQL from Source.

To install and use a MySQL binary distribution, the command sequence looks like this:

shell> groupadd mysql
shell> useradd -r -g mysql -s /bin/false mysql
shell> cd /usr/local
shell> tar zxvf /path/to/mysql-VERSION-OS.tar.gz
shell> ln -s full-path-to-mysql-VERSION-OS mysql
shell> cd mysql
shell> chown -R mysql .
shell> chgrp -R mysql .
shell> scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
shell> chown -R root .
shell> chown -R mysql data
# Next command is optional
shell> cp support-files/my-medium.cnf /etc/my.cnf
shell> bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql &
# Next command is optional
shell> cp support-files/mysql.server /etc/init.d/mysql.server

Note

This procedure assumes that you have root (administrator) access to your system. Alternatively, you can prefix each command using the sudo (Linux) or pfexec (OpenSolaris) command.

Note

The procedure does not assign passwords to MySQL accounts. To do so, use the instructions in Securing the Initial MySQL Accounts.

A more detailed version of the preceding description for installing a binary distribution follows.

Create a mysql User and Group

If your system does not already have a user and group to use for running mysqld, you may need to create one. The following commands add the mysql group and the mysql user. You might want to call the user and group something else instead of mysql. If so, substitute the appropriate name in the following instructions. The syntax for useradd and groupadd may differ slightly on different versions of Unix, or they may have different names such as adduser and addgroup.

shell> groupadd mysql
shell> useradd -r -g mysql -s /bin/false mysql

Note

Because the user is required only for ownership purposes, not login purposes, the useradd command uses the -r and -s /bin/false options to create a user that does not have login permissions to your server host. Omit these options if your useradd does not support them.

Obtain and Unpack the Distribution

Pick the directory under which you want to unpack the distribution and change location into it. The example here unpacks the distribution under /usr/local. The instructions, therefore, assume that you have permission to create files and directories in /usr/local. If that directory is protected, you must perform the installation as root.

shell> cd /usr/local

Obtain a distribution file using the instructions in How to Get MySQL. For a given release, binary distributions for all platforms are built from the same MySQL source distribution.

Unpack the distribution, which creates the installation directory. Then create a symbolic link to that directory. tar can uncompress and unpack the distribution if it has z option support:

shell> tar zxvf /path/to/mysql-VERSION-OS.tar.gz
shell> ln -s full-path-to-mysql-VERSION-OS mysql

The tar command creates a directory named mysql-VERSION-OS. The ln command makes a symbolic link to that directory. This enables you to refer more easily to the installation directory as /usr/local/mysql.

To install MySQL from a compressed tar file binary distribution, your system must have GNU gunzip to uncompress the distribution and a reasonable tar to unpack it. If your tar program supports the z option, it can both uncompress and unpack the file.

GNU tar is known to work. The standard tar provided with some operating systems is not able to unpack the long file names in the MySQL distribution. You should download and install GNU tar, or if available, use a preinstalled version of GNU tar. Usually this is available as gnutar, gtar, or as tar within a GNU or Free Software directory, such as /usr/sfw/bin or /usr/local/bin. GNU tar is available from http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/.

If your tar does not have z option support, use gunzip to unpack the distribution and tar to unpack it. Replace the preceding tar command with the following alternative command to uncompress and extract the distribution:

shell> gunzip < /path/to/mysql-VERSION-OS.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Perform Postinstallation Setup

The remainder of the installation process involves setting distribution ownership and access permissions, initializing the data directory, starting the MySQL server, and setting up the configuration file. For instructions, see Postinstallation Setup and Testing.

Chapter 2 Installing MySQL on Solaris and OpenSolaris

Table of Contents

2.1 Installing MySQL on Solaris Using a Solaris PKG

2.2 Installing MySQL on OpenSolaris Using IPS

MySQL on Solaris and OpenSolaris is available in a number of different formats.

For information on installing using the native Solaris PKG format, see Section 2.1, “Installing MySQL on Solaris Using a Solaris PKG”.

On OpenSolaris, the standard package repositories include MySQL packages specially built for OpenSolaris that include entries for the Service Management Framework (SMF) to enable control of the installation using the SMF administration commands. For more information, see Section 2.2, “Installing MySQL on OpenSolaris Using IPS”.

To use a standard tar binary installation, use the notes provided in Chapter 1, Installing MySQL on Unix/Linux Using Generic Binaries. Check the notes and hints at the end of this section for Solaris specific notes that you may need before or after installation.

For information on installing MySQL on Solaris or OpenSolaris using a source distribution, first check the Solaris advice, Chapter 3, Notes on Installing MySQL on Solaris from Source. For detailed instructions on installing from source, see Installing MySQL from Source.

To obtain a binary MySQL distribution for Solaris in tarball or PKG format, http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html.

Additional notes to be aware of when installing and using MySQL on Solaris:

If you want to use MySQL with the mysql user and group, use the groupadd and useradd commands:

groupadd mysql
useradd -g mysql -s /bin/false mysql

If you install MySQL using a binary tarball distribution on Solaris, you may run into trouble even before you get the MySQL distribution unpacked, as the Solaris tar cannot handle long file names. This means that you may see errors when you try to unpack MySQL.

If this occurs, you must use GNU tar (gtar) to unpack the distribution. In Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris gtar is normally located in /usr/sfw/bin/gtar, but may not be included in the default path definition.

When using Solaris 10 for x86_64, you should mount any file systems on which you intend to store InnoDB files with the forcedirectio option. (By default mounting is done without this option.) Failing to do so will cause a significant drop in performance when using the InnoDB storage engine on this platform.

If you would like MySQL to start automatically, you can copy support-files/mysql.server to /etc/init.d and create a symbolic link to it named /etc/rc3.d/S99mysql.server.

If too many processes try to connect very rapidly to mysqld, you should see this error in the MySQL log:

Error in accept: Protocol error

You might try starting the server with the --back_log=50 option as a workaround for this.

To configure the generation of core files on Solaris you should use the coreadm command. Because of the security implications of generating a core on a setuid() application, by default, Solaris does not support core files on setuid() programs. However, you can modify this behavior using coreadm. If you enable setuid() core files for the current user, they will be generated using the mode 600 and owned by the superuser.

2.1 Installing MySQL on Solaris Using a Solaris PKG

You can install MySQL on Solaris and OpenSolaris using a binary package using the native Solaris PKG format instead of the binary tarball distribution.

To use this package, download the corresponding mysql-VERSION-solaris10-PLATFORM.pkg.gz file, then uncompress it. For example:

shell> gunzip mysql-5.1.73-solaris10-x86_64.pkg.gz

To install a new package, use pkgadd and follow the onscreen prompts. You must have root privileges to perform this operation:

shell> pkgadd -d mysql-5.1.73-solaris10-x86_64.pkg
The following packages are available:
  1  mysql     MySQL Community Server (GPL)
               (i86pc) 5.1.73
Select package(s) you wish to process (or 'all' to process
all packages). (default: all) [?,??,q]:

The PKG installer installs all of the files and tools needed, and then initializes your database if one does not exist. To complete the installation, you should set the root password for MySQL as provided in the instructions at the end of the installation. Alternatively, you can run the mysql_secure_installation script that comes with the installation.

By default, the PKG package installs MySQL under the root path /opt/mysql. You can change only the installation root path when using pkgadd, which can be used to install MySQL in a different Solaris zone. If you need to install in a specific directory, use a binary tar file distribution.

The pkg installer copies a suitable startup script for MySQL into /etc/init.d/mysql. To enable MySQL to startup and shutdown automatically, you should create a link between this file and the init script directories. For example, to ensure safe startup and shutdown of MySQL you could use the following commands to add the right links:

shell> ln /etc/init.d/mysql /etc/rc3.d/S91mysql
shell> ln /etc/init.d/mysql /etc/rc0.d/K02mysql

To remove MySQL, the installed package name is mysql. You can use this in combination with the pkgrm command to remove the installation.

To upgrade when using the Solaris package file format, you must remove the existing installation before installing the updated package. Removal of the package does not delete the existing database information, only the server, binaries and support files. The typical upgrade sequence is therefore:

shell> mysqladmin shutdown
shell> pkgrm mysql
shell> pkgadd -d mysql-5.1.73-solaris10-x86_64.pkg
shell> mysqld_safe &
shell> mysql_upgrade

You should check the notes in Upgrading or Downgrading MySQL before performing any upgrade.

2.2 Installing MySQL on OpenSolaris Using IPS

OpenSolaris includes standard packages for MySQL in the core repository. The MySQL packages are based on a specific release of MySQL and updated periodically. For the latest release you must use either the native Solaris PKG, tar, or source installations. The native OpenSolaris packages include SMF files so that you can easily control your MySQL installation, including automatic startup and recovery, using the native service management tools.

To install MySQL on OpenSolaris, use the pkg command. You will need to be logged in as root, or use the pfexec tool, as shown in the example below:

shell> pfexec pkg install SUNWmysql51

The package set installs three individual packages, SUNWmysql51lib, which contains the MySQL client libraries; SUNWmysql51r which contains the root components, including SMF and configuration files; and SUNWmysql51u which contains the scripts, binary tools and other files. You can install these packages individually if you only need the corresponding components.

The MySQL files are installed into /usr/mysql which symbolic links for the sub directories (bin, lib, etc.) to a version specific directory. For MySQL 5.1, the full installation is located in /usr/mysql/5.1. The default data directory is /var/mysql/5.1/data. The configuration file is installed in /etc/mysql/5.1/my.cnf. This layout permits multiple versions of MySQL to be installed, without overwriting the data and binaries from other versions.

Once installed, you must initialize the data directory (see Initializing the Data Directory), and use the mysql_secure_installation to secure your installation.

Using SMF to manage your MySQL installation

Once installed, you can start and stop your MySQL server using the installed SMF configuration. The service name is mysql, or if you have multiple versions installed, you should use the full version name, for example mysql:version_51. To start and enable MySQL to be started at boot time:

shell> svcadm enable mysql

To disable MySQL from starting during boot time, and shut the MySQL server down if it is running, use:

shell> svcadm disable mysql

To restart MySQL, for example after a configuration file changes, use the restart option:

shell> svcadm restart mysql

You can also use SMF to configure the data directory and enable full 64-bit mode. For example, to set the data directory used by MySQL:

shell> svccfg
svc:> select mysql:version_51
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_51> setprop mysql/data=/data0/mysql

By default, the 32-bit binaries are used. To enable the 64-bit server on 64-bit platforms, set the enable_64bit parameter. For example:

svc:/application/database/mysql:version_51> setprop mysql/enable_64bit=1

You need to refresh the SMF after settings these options:

shell> svcadm refresh mysql

Chapter 3 Notes on Installing MySQL on Solaris from Source

When building MySQL on Solaris you can use either the Sun Studio or GNU cc compilers. For more information on specific notes and environments, use the following hints.

When building you should ensure that your PATH variable includes the necessary tools, including ar for building libraries. Some tools are located in /usr/ccs/bin.

When running configure, you should specify the C and C++ compiler explicitly to ensure that the right C compiler combination is used:

CC=gcc CXX=g++ ./configure

If you have an UltraSPARC system, you can get 4% better performance by adding -mcpu=v8 -Wa,-xarch=v8plusa to the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS environment variables.

If you have Sun's Forte 5.00 (or newer) or Sun Studio compiler, you can run configure like this:

CC=cc CFLAGS="-Xa -fast -native -xstrconst -mt" \
CXX=CC CXXFLAGS="-noex -mt" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --enable-assembler

To create a 64-bit SPARC binary with Sun's Forte or Sun Studio compiler, use the following configuration options:

CC=cc CFLAGS="-Xa -fast -native -xstrconst -mt -xarch=v9" \
CXX=CC CXXFLAGS="-noex -mt -xarch=v9" ASFLAGS="-xarch=v9" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --enable-assembler

To create a 64-bit Solaris binary using gcc, add -m64 to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS and remove --enable-assembler from the configure line.

In the MySQL benchmarks, we obtained a 4% speed increase on UltraSPARC when using Forte 5.0 in 32-bit mode, as compared to using gcc 3.2 with the -mcpu flag.

If you create a 64-bit mysqld binary, it is 4% slower than the 32-bit binary, but can handle more threads and memory.

If you get a problem with fdatasync or sched_yield, you can fix this by adding LIBS=-lrt to the configure line

Solaris does not provide static versions of all system libraries (libpthreads and libdl), so you cannot compile MySQL with --static. If you try to do so, you get one of the following errors:

ld: fatal: library -ldl: not found
undefined reference to `dlopen'
cannot find -lrt

If you link your own MySQL client programs, you may see the following error at runtime:

ld.so.1: fatal: libmysqlclient.so.#:
open failed: No such file or directory

To avoid this problem, use one of the following methods:

Use the crle tool to add the directory containing the libmysqlclient library file to the list of standard library directories. You need administrator privileges to do this. Make sure you update the library information, rather than replace it with the new path. For example, the following command adds the directory to the list of standard directories searched for libraries.

crle -u -l /usr/local/mysql/lib

For 64-bit libraries, add the -64 option:

crle -64 -u -l /usr/local/mysql/lib

Link clients with the -Wl,r/full/path/to/libmysqlclient.so flag rather than with -Lpath).

Copy libmysqlclient.so to /usr/lib.

Add the path name of the directory where libmysqlclient.so is located to the LD_RUN_PATH environment variable before running your client.

If you have problems with configure trying to link with -lz when you do not have zlib installed, you have two options:

If you want to be able to use the compressed communication protocol, obtain and install zlib from ftp.gnu.org.

To build without zlib, run configure with the --with-named-z-libs=no option when building MySQL.

If you are using gcc and have problems with loading user-defined functions (UDFs) into MySQL, try adding -lgcc to the link line for the UDF.