Thursday, January 19, 2006

Can MySQL be run from a CDROM?

I got an interesting comment the other day from Aniket, a reader of my blog.

He asks:

i'm in the process of designing a GPS system and wanted to know that is it possible to keep MySQL and the database on a CDROM and query it from a C IDE(KDevelop)?
My answer:

While I haven't done this (tried to run MySQL from a CDROM), I would think that this is not possible since MySQL needs to create temporary tables from time to time and I can't see that happening if MYSQL and the database are installed on a CDROM.

Am I right?

What do you guys (MySQL experts) think?

Can a database and MySQL be run from a CDROM? What if plenty of RAM is available?

Has anyone been able to do this before?

What alternatives exist for Aniket?

Thank you,

Frank

6 comments:

Jan Steinman said...

I'll bet with judicious symbolic links to /tmp and perhaps a startup script to copy only tables that must be read-write, it could be done.

Aniket said...

Jan,can you explain what you mean to say in more detail.Pardon me but, i couldn't get what you are saying.
(Is it possible to access the database on the cd even if i keep the MySQL on the hard drive now.If i do not wish to keep the database on the HDD.I wish to store it in the CD itself.Is this possible.)
Thanks for the help already given.Frank and Jan both of you.

Frank said...

Thank you Jan for your answer. Looking forward for a bit of clarification.

Thanks
Frank

Frank said...

Stewart Smith says Yes!

He posted an answer on his blog to our question, "Can MySQL be run from a CDROM," from which I am quoting here:

"Temporary tables can be store anywhere - e.g. the system’s temporary directory (/tmp on unix, probably c:\temp or something on windows… i’m sure there’s one of those %FOO% things for it)."

See his post for more on when you will need to get a license.

Thanks Stewart!

Frank

Anonymous said...

Hi, my name is Andrei Balaj. I have used a mysql database from a cd, the software to do that is : server2go. This is excactly what you need. Mysql from cd.

Anonymous said...

Also see:
http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/59305.html