Big Tables on AIX 4.3.2

[James Thorpe]

Hi Everyone

I know this type of question has been answered quite frequently so
please accept my apologies if this is "old hat" and just annoying. I
have spent a good few hours searching past discussions and the 'net
but I still haven't been successful so I'm posting my question here.

I am building a database in MySql with only two tables but the one
table will definitely need to be a few Gigabytes in size. How do I do
this ?

I am working on AIX 4.3.2 and I have created a file larger than 2G
with the cat command so I know the OS can handle large files. I set my
soft and hard file size limits to unlimited and started loading the
database.

When the table file (*.MYI) approached 2G, the load command quit with
an error 36 (I think) which I guess must be the table size limit
exceeded or something.

I ran the command "show table status" and I get a max_data_length
value for all my tables as 2147483647. I tried to create a table with
the max_rows=100000000 setting and that worked but I still have
max_data_length for this new table as 2147483647 !

Help !

Specifically, my questions are:

1) Is the value of max_data_length a reliable way of determining
allowed table size ? Can I be sure that until this setting exceeds
2147483647 I will not be able to create tables > 2G ?
2) I am using AIX 4.3.2 and the binary distribution
mysql-3.23.8-alpha-ibm-aix4.2.1.0-powerpc. Is this version built for
support of large files ? If not, how do I go about building one ?

Many thanks in advance.

James
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James Thorpe
CCWR User Consultant
thorpe@stripped
tel: [phone]
http://www.ccwr.ac.za/ccwr/users/thorpe

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

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