Setup database: MySQL or MariaDB

Requirements

MySQL 4.1.1 or later, and any releases of MariaDB will work.
Install DBD-mysql package.
MyISAM or Aria, and InnoDB or XtraDB storage engines may work. Check default-storage-engine and default-table-type options of your MySQL / MariaDB server.

General instruction

Ensure that sympa.conf includes appropriate values for these parameters: db_type, db_name, db_host, db_port (optional), db_user and db_passwd (optional).
- db_type must be MySQL or mysql (obsoleted).
- If db_host is set to localhost, Sympa will connect to database on local machine using Unix domain socket. Otherwise, if another host name or IP address is set, TCP socket will be used (If db_port is not specified, 3306 will be used as port).
Example:
```
db_type MySQL
db_name sympa
db_host localhost
db_user sympa
db_passwd (secret)
```

Create database and database user:

$ mysql
mysql> CREATE DATABASE sympa CHARACTER SET utf8;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sympa.* TO <db_user>@<client host>
    -> IDENTIFIED BY '<db_passwd>';
mysql> QUIT

Create table structure:
```
# sympa.pl --health_check
```

Note

MySQL/MariaDB 5.5.3 or later provides utf8mb4 character set which covers full range of Unicode including such as Chinese ideographs used for persons' names. As of Sympa-6.2a.33 r8753, both utf8 and utf8mb4 character sets are supported. To use utf8mb4 character set, you might want to replace utf8 in SQL statement above with utf8mb4.

Instruction for earlier releases of Sympa

Note

This section describes instruction with Sympa prior to 6.2.

Set appropriate parameters in sympa.conf as described in above.
Create database and table structure (Note: replace $SCRIPTDIR):
```
$ mysql < $SCRIPTDIR/create_db.mysql
```

Grant database privileges:

$ mysql
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sympa.* TO <db_user>@<client host>
    -> IDENTIFIED BY '<db_passwd>';
mysql> QUIT

Tuning

With Sympa 6.0.x and 6.1.x, Sympa uses database as message spool. Thus, size of database server's communication buffer has to be as large as it can accept messages.

To know maximum message size allowed to be stored in database, run:

# sympa.pl --test_database_message_buffer

Then, if the result was smaller than what you expect, make max_allowed_packet parameter in my.cnf larger, and run the command above again.