Hi,

finally I made my transition to KDE4. It was a bit bumby (Kubuntu ), but finally I have working system and looking for ways to tweak it. That is where I have a question:

I noticed Akonadi is using its own MySQL-database. Since I have MySQL-server already locally running this may be a waste of system resources? Is there any way to let Akonadi use the already running mysql server? I have already seen something for doing this in systemsettings. The problem is: I have not set up the MySQL-server, someone did it for me. So I do not have a clue what and how to do it exactly. What settings do i have to use? Do I have to convert the database in way?
Then i noticed that Amarok is also using its own MySQL-Server. Or at least it was? It is not clear if the instructions and information given in the wiki stil apply for the Amarok2-series. Does anyone know?

Then finally I heard that Firefox also uses a SQL-database for storing its bookmarks. So here would be same problem.

Did anyone try to save system resources via this way? Is it worth it? I just heard that MySQL eats up a lot of resources so it seems like a good way for some tweaks.

Greetings

Markum

Edit: I noticed I posted to the wrong Forum category. Can someone of the modteam move this?

It used to be possible to configure Amarok to use the system MySQL server, but in KDE4's spirit of Gnome-like removal of configuration choices, that seems to have been removed.

Firefox is slightly different as it uses SQLite, which means its database engine is part of the Firefox binary. SQLite is a very lightweight system, so using the system MySQL engine would make Firefox more resource-hungry.

I can't comment about Akonadi, as I disabled it as soon as it arrived, not being able to see any use for it.

Moved to Installation and Configuration.

markum wrote:I noticed Akonadi is using its own MySQL-database. Since I have MySQL-server already locally running this may be a waste of system resources? Is there any way to let Akonadi use the already running mysql server? I have already seen something for doing this in systemsettings. The problem is: I have not set up the MySQL-server, someone did it for me. So I do not have a clue what and how to do it exactly. What settings do i have to use? Do I have to convert the database in way?

Akonadi can use a system wide MySQL server, however there is no GUI for that yet which means it has to be done manually in the config file.

Cheers,
_

Amarok's developers made it quite clear why the change was made, in order to reduce development overhead and reduce code complexity. It would be quite possible for integration with remote MySQL servers to be restored in the future, but not PostgreSQL. It has not been implemented as far as I am aware at this time.

anda_skoa wrote:
Akonadi can use a system wide MySQL server, however there is no GUI for that yet which means it has to be done manually in the config file.

I have here (trunk of last week) an option in systemsettings "use internal MySQL server", which, when unchecked, allows you to specify a host and other connection parameters. Not sure if it works properly (I have no means to test it), though.

einar wrote:

anda_skoa wrote:
Akonadi can use a system wide MySQL server, however there is no GUI for that yet which means it has to be done manually in the config file.

I have here (trunk of last week) an option in systemsettings "use internal MySQL server", which, when unchecked, allows you to specify a host and other connection parameters. Not sure if it works properly (I have no means to test it), though.

I have that too. But I did not dare to test it, since I do not know anything about how to configure it exactly and I want to be sure not to lose any data.

It appears to me that if it is true that Amarok, Akonadi and may be other applications use a mysql or similar server, that it would be in the spirit of resource saving and sharing to have only one of them running and KDE provide a central setting for that like: standard mailer, standard browser. Or is there anything which stands against this idea?

Markum

markum wrote:I have that too. But I did not dare to test it, since I do not know anything about how to configure it exactly and I want to be sure not to lose any data.

All data should be in the actual resource files, the database only contains data transiently.
But you can also backup that data through the akonaditray application or by creating a backup of $HOME/.local/share/akonadi

markum wrote:It appears to me that if it is true that Amarok, Akonadi and may be other applications use a mysql or similar server, that it would be in the spirit of resource saving and sharing to have only one of them running and KDE provide a central setting for that like: standard mailer, standard browser. Or is there anything which stands against this idea?

This is being discussed. One difficulty at least for Akonadi is that it must not depend on KDE, e.g. remain viable as a cross-desktop solution.

Cheers,
_

anda_skoa wrote:

markum wrote:It appears to me that if it is true that Amarok, Akonadi and may be other applications use a mysql or similar server, that it would be in the spirit of resource saving and sharing to have only one of them running and KDE provide a central setting for that like: standard mailer, standard browser. Or is there anything which stands against this idea?

This is being discussed. One difficulty at least for Akonadi is that it must not depend on KDE, e.g. remain viable as a cross-desktop solution.

That is true, but since apps like Firefox also use databases the solution could be to have this as an opendesktop standard like "xdg-...". Or does this take to long to establish this?

Markum

SQLite might work for bookmarks and be ok for firefox but for apps like Amarok it just doesnt scale well, at least for me. I have a fairly huge mp3 collection and sqlite frankly was a joke. Playing songs and having a 2 minute silence between songs playing would be what i would call a bug, but after migrating the datastore over to mysql, no silence between songs and honestly there is so much more that i can do with the data from amarok because it is finally in a "real" database.

I have setup akonadi to use mysql and for the most part it appears to work, BUT the one gotcha that i have to resolve it to set the db engine to use innodb instead of myisam as myisam does not support transactions so i get error messages periodically from AkonadiTray stating std.vcf "Unknown error. (There is no transaction in progress"

Granted its a bit annoying and given the time ill change the storage engine for Akonadi and hope that resolves it. My biggest problem is the lack of working imap filters as i have about 9 accounts with hundreds of folders and on my last machine about 400 filters to keep my world sane. Every time i check mail now i have over 7000 unread emails per account and no hope of sorting this out till filters are working correctly.

markum wrote:

anda_skoa wrote:

markum wrote:It appears to me that if it is true that Amarok, Akonadi and may be other applications use a mysql or similar server, that it would be in the spirit of resource saving and sharing to have only one of them running and KDE provide a central setting for that like: standard mailer, standard browser. Or is there anything which stands against this idea?

This is being discussed. One difficulty at least for Akonadi is that it must not depend on KDE, e.g. remain viable as a cross-desktop solution.

That is true, but since apps like Firefox also use databases the solution could be to have this as an opendesktop standard like "xdg-...". Or does this take to long to establish this?

Stuff like that can take ages.
Difficulties are the different requirements, migrating already exisiting databases, etc.
And there would have to be at least two possible choices, since people can be very political about which software they want on their system.

Cheers,
_

tek wrote:I have setup akonadi to use mysql and for the most part it appears to work, BUT the one gotcha that i have to resolve it to set the db engine to use innodb instead of myisam as myisam does not support transactions so i get error messages periodically from AkonadiTray stating std.vcf "Unknown error. (There is no transaction in progress"

You should be able to fix that manually.

Dump the database into a file using mysqldump, then edit the lines that say

Code: Select all

ENGINE=MyISAM

to say

Code: Select all

ENGINE=InnoDB

then rebuild the database from the file.

I very much doubt that it will care what sort of database engine's being used, it's just that it's creating it with MyISAM. Keep your dump files just in case though...