phpBB db moves

and attendant problems thereof

[vkaryl]

Not sure that anyone will ever be particularly interested in this, but had I been able to find a reference herein or on the phpBB support community, no doubt it would have taken me FAR less than 5 or so hours to figure it out.... (okay, I'm old, slow, AND BLOND, so deal with it!)

Anyway. Eventually you will need to move a viable db from one server to another. So you will load up phpMyAdmin, and sit there waiting patiently in a glow of self-congratulation because the proggie does it all for you.... only you get the dreaded "300 sec timeout" error message.... So you cuss a lot and kick everything but the cpu and email the techie who says "huh?", so you cuss some more.... then you look at all the tables, rows, db variables, etc.... then....

Here's what you do. Select every table in the db which is "0" or anything else under 500 kb and export them to a file on your machine, then upload that file to your new mysql db using the "Or Location of the textfile :" text area field. When that's done, return to the old db, select one at a time any table which is MORE than 500 kb and export them individually to your machine (no compression seems to work fine but gzip if you like), then upload to the new db.

Now this system works perfectly UNLESS AND UNTIL one or more of your tables exceeds 9800 kb (um. Arbitrary determination: a 9764 kb table on my old db worked just fine gzipped, but a 9858 kb one timed out, coughed and died....) When you have a large table like that, select it singly and download to your machine gzipped, then upload it to the new db singly.

And if you have a table or so which is absolutely HUMONGOUS (mine was 3 mb GZIPPED!), then you have to finagle as follows....

Send the humongous table to your machine as an uncompressed file. Once it's resident, open it in notepad - really, it's just text.... Go to your phpMyAdmin SQL page for the relevant db. Copy from the downloaded file the "create table" info into the "query" text area (if necessary), and use "go" to create it.

Then copy from the notepad file up to 2000 lines of table data at a time, clicking "go" to insert the info into the relevant table. Repeat as necessary.

Tedious? A bit. Better than relying on way-too-busy tech support or assuming that 3rd party stuff will put your priceless info where it needs to be in a usable format....