[BBLISA] How to retreive data from an old MySQL database

[Steve Revilak]

DouglasAlan> I'd like to retrieve some wiki pages from an old MySQL
DouglasAlan> database.  Unfortunately, mysqldump doesn't work -- I'm
DouglasAlan> guessing because the version of mysqld currently
DouglasAlan> installed doesn't match the version of the database that
DouglasAlan> was used for the wiki.

TomMetro> What happens when you try and access the database via the
TomMetro> mysql client on the server?

Tom's question is really the key issue.  mysqldump works through
mysqld; it doesn't access data files directly.  (try mysqldump
--verbose, and you'll see exactly what it's doing).  Through the mysql
client, does "select count(*) from TABLE" work for your wiki tables??

If the tables happened to be in the old ISAM format and your current
installation is >= 4.1, then I think that you'll need to go back to an
older version, copy the data files where the older version can see
them, and dump your data from there.

At startup time, does mysqld mention your wiki tables in its error
log?  (normally named HOSTNAME.err, in the mysqld data directory) I'm
assuming it's nothing obvious like file permissions.

If you're dealing with an authoritarian package manager, it may be
easiest to grab one of the tar.gz distributions from
http://downloads.mysql.com/archives.php, unpack it in a temporary
directory and work with that.

TomMetro> I didn't see any relevant options, but I'd investigate
TomMetro> commands like mysql_convert_table_format or
TomMetro> mysql_install_db. Those may be Debian specific. The
TomMetro> conversion scripts also might only be part of the installer
TomMetro> and not installed on the system.

Those scripts should be part of any mysql distribution.
mysql_install_db creates the mysqld's mysql database and
mysql_convert_table_format is really just a fancy wrapper around
"alter table .. ENGINE= ...".