[mythtv-users] error when fixing database forced by mythtv upgrade

[Michael T. Dean]

On 10/16/2009 04:31 PM, Jim Stichnoth wrote:
> When I first started testing 0.22, I had troubles getting the schema
> upgrade to work.  It was also failing in the DB charset conversion
> step.  It turned out I was running out of disk space on the test
> system.  The charset conversion step creates a temporary table based
> on the People table, and that temporary table temporarily takes up
> mysql disk space.  If you have 6 years worth of data, the People table
> should be quite large.

No, not really.  It should be less than 140 bytes per person (and 
possibly even smaller after conversion).  On my 5-yr-old system, that's 
about 11MiB with >86K people.

*However*, if you have /partial/ DB corruption such that you have 
multiple copies of each person with differently-encoded names, then it 
might be quite large.

Note, also, if you have such corruption in people, you almost definitely 
have it elsewhere, so deleting the only indicator of a problem just so 
you can upgrade simply means you're sweeping all the problems under the 
rug and putting the "less-easily-detectable" corrupt data into MythTV, 
where it may cause failures of anything from the backend to the frontend...

Mike