Inside Documentum

Nice one MySQL

I don’t use MySQL much, my experience is very much in the Oracle area with SQL Server a close second. This is not surprising as Oracle and SQL Server are the primary databases used with Documentum and MySQL isn’t even supported for Documentum Content Server. However from time to time I need to use it.

I was running the Windows-based installer for a MySQL installation and ran through the installation screens pretty quickly and started the installation. All in all this took only a few minutes, however right at the end I got an error message about being unable to apply security settings. For a moment my heart sank as I could see that a job that seemed like would be completed very quickly would now involve possibly hours of internet trawling, re-installation and so on. However as I read the accompanying dialog box it told me that if I was re-installing after uninstalling then my previous data directory would still be there and would have the old password set; I needed to simply skip the final step and go to to the configuration program and re-do the configuration. I had indeed just uninstalled and the solution offered fixed my problem immediately.

Great work by the MySQL installation team – if only other product installer were quite so helpful. I’m guessing here that this was a problem that had been reported, a workaround identified and then someone had seen fit to add the solution into the installation process itself.