As usual I wasn’t following instruction while trying to update MySQL on my dev laptop. There’s some decent upgrade documentation on the MySQL site (here if you’re looking for it.) but its a lot to think about all at once and all the warnings didn’t seem to apply to the databases I had. The first thing I didn’t do was backup the database. I figured the installer would see that I had MySQL on the machine and would update things accordingly. I was wrong. The second thing I didn’t do was uninstall the MySQL service that was currently running. So, after the installer failed to configure the service, I was a bit stuck.

Luckily I was rescued by SQLYog. SQLYog has a nice feature that restores an existing database and it does it not from a db dump file, but from the db tables themselves. So you point to your existing data directory and away it goes. SQLYog has a free version (as in beer) that’s fairly decent and the pro and enterprise versions are fairly inexpensive. The only downside is that it is only for MySQL.

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