CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

It is soooo frustrating to see 2.1 rolled out with lots of good sounding new stuff and be completely unable to use it because of the dumb decision to require MySQL5

CiviCRM requires MySQL 5 since the fist alpha of CiviCRM 2.0, as announced in January.

Was this *really* necessary? How much v5 specific stuff is there? Has anyone got any information as to exactly what wont work on a MySQL4 database - and is there any way to patch around this?

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Whoever decided this seems to have been seriously out of touch with the real world.

MySQL 5.0 was released  three years ago. MySQL 4.1 is has been out of active support for the past 19 months, and nothing below severity level 1 is fixed. I’d love to hear the reasons for sticking to MySQL 4.1 and not upgrading to MySQL 5.0.

I'd also be interested in understanding why switching LAMP stacks is such a barrier in your case.

I make the assumption that switching shared hosts is a pretty straight forward process, switching is probably challenging if you have IT standardization on a specific LAMP stack. If you are on a VPS, not a super big deal.

Now I completely get not having the skills to make those changes would be a significant barrier, but there are plenty of folks on the consultant list that can help you out.
http://civicrm.org/professional

We've talked about why InnoDB is important for a CRM in a few other forum posts. There are a fair number of shared hosting providers that do offer InnoDB. The core team does not plan on offering a non-InnoDB version of CiviCRM.

lobo

Absolutely right. This particular client is on a shared host and VERY unwilling to switch (and I fully support them in that, why should they, they are perfectly happy with their hosting). The hosting provider is adamant that MySQL 4 is still fully supported and that there is no reason to switch to 5 yet - and I see their point.

Impasse - stuck with Civi2.0 and no possibility of upgrading for a while yet. Out in the real world of not-for-profit third sector organisations whom Civi allegedly targets there is a shortage of skills and/or money to pay for things like VPS's, own servers, etc etc. Price may well be a factor in selecting a host, and if you cant afford to pay for the latest you wont get the latest.

I could understand the decision to move to MySQL5 if this was a commercial product, but it just doesn't make sense for an open source community based effort. Maybe it is part of a move to make Civi commercial? I do hope not.

As it happens it appears that most of Civi 2.1 will actually run in a MySQL4 environment - but having no definitive answer to the question of what might not work I can't afford to take the risk on the live system.

Never mind, the existing system is working with a few annoyances - frustratingly some of these are reportedly fixed in Civi2.1 (eg picture fields in profiles) but I guess we wont find out for another 6 months or so.

Meanwhile I wish the development team well with their shiny new toy - hopefully by the time I can use it there will be a small relatively bug-free window before the team moves it up to the next incompatible platform (php7 perhaps  )

RogerCO

I too was happy with our (free) hosting provider until I wanted to install civi. The free hosting did have mysql5.x but it was inflexible in other areas ( e.g. memory limit) and I wasted a lot of time mucking around on it.


I set up hosting with a new ISP -less than  $US15 per month - and set up civi there. It was a really good move and I'm much more happy with our new hosting provider