MySQL Upgrade To 5.1: Database Name Prefix #mysql50#

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Mattias Geniar, August 07, 2010

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If you’ve upgraded from a MySQL version prior to 5.1, to a MySQL version of 5.1 or later, you might find some of your databases have their names altered to “#mysql50#dbname", where it used to be just “dbname".

This is because in MySQL 5.1 the data directory structure changed.

You can either alter your queries, so you retrieve from the database “#mysql50#dbname”, or you can be sane and do the following query to upgrade the data directory structure. Note; this assumes you have shell access to the server with enough privileges! If you don’t, please contact your server administrator.

mysql > ALTER DATABASE `#mysql50#dbname` UPGRADE DATA DIRECTORY NAME;

Note the backticks (`), that’s not a single quote.

You might run into the following error when you first do so:

ERROR 1558 (HY000): Column count of mysql.proc is wrong. Expected 20, found 16. 
Created with MySQL 50077, now running 50148. Please use mysql_upgrade to fix this error.

To fix this, run the following on the server’s command line.

# mysql_upgrade -h localhost -u root -p

For Plesk environments, you can use

# mysql_upgrade -h localhost -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow `

This will update the necessary database entries to the latest version of MySQL. Chances are, this will even have fixed the ‘#mysql50#’ database prefix for you. If it hasn’t, return to the first step here.

More information can be found at the bottom of MySQL’s Documentation on the ALTER DATABASE command.



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