Hello
I have usetwo questions about the default d by MediaWiki to create its MySql database : 1. why the innoDB type is chosen for the tables except hitcounter (HEAP) searchindex (MyISAM)
may be I forgot to give some information at the configuration step? Is there a way to ask for MyISAM type for all ?
2. why I got latin1_swedish_ci for *collation* and not some utf8 character_set instead, did I missed some parametrization?
Thanks for helping.
Francois Colonna
On 01/04/07, Frames Project frames@lct.jussieu.fr wrote:
- why the innoDB type is chosen for the tables except
InnoDB is better; it supports larger tables, longer indexes, and has decent support for transactions, which is somewhat essential to keep data consistent.
hitcounter (HEAP)
This table is used to temporarily stash the results of view counters per-page. On a periodic basis, this information is "flushed" back into page.page_counter. Using an in-memory table for this is faster. The information here isn't so critical.
searchindex (MyISAM)
The default search engine uses full text matching, which is a feature of MyISAM, hence, the search index table has to be MyISAM.
Is there a way to ask for MyISAM type for all ?
It's not advisable.
- why I got latin1_swedish_ci for *collation* and not some utf8
character_set instead, did I missed some parametrization?
You selected the defaults. MediaWiki's current default behaviour is to ignore the collation of the database, and store UTF-8 data in latin1 tables; it doesn't care what MySQL thinks the collation is. This is because MediaWiki predates MySQL's shaky UTF-8 support (which still isn't quite up to what we need).
This can cause problems if MySQL tries to perform conversions on import/export; see the mailing list archives for information on getting around this.
We provide two experimental schemas which can be selected during installation of 1.9.0+ that use UTF-8 collation, and configure MediaWiki to treat the database server as using UTF-8. These are experimental.
Rob Church
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org