= MySQL and the MySQLdb Python bindings for MySQL =

 ''work in progress, only the most critical information is there for now''

Starting with [milestone:0.10] Trac can use MySQL for its DatabaseBackend.

Well, sort of.

Better is to use [milestone:0.10.3], and only starting with [milestone:0.10.4] will MySQL be fully supported (at least that's the plan).

== Requirements ==
=== MySQL ===

In order to avoid several issues related to the use of unicode characters throughout Trac, we '''''strongly''''' advise MySQL users to only use databases having the ''`utf8`'' character set and the ''`utf8_general_ci`'' collation type.

Such databases can be created with the MySQL monitor, like that:
{{{
CREATE DATABASE trac DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci; 
}}}

See also #3884.

It has also been [comment:ticket:3659:5 recommended] to use InnoDB instead of MyISAM tables, though it's not completely clear at this point if this really helps.

=== MySQLdb ===
The recommended version for now is MySQL-python 1.2.1_p2.

Other versions (MySQL-python 1.2.0-3.2.2, MySQL-python 1.2.2b2) were reported to have issues (see #3645).  On the other hand, MySQL-python-1.2.2b2 was [googlegroups:trac-users:e291b3ecb4a990a1 reported] to solve an `AttributeError: 'array.array' object has no attribute 'startswith'` error seen when viewing a changeset...

== Known Issues ==
=== Still Opened ===
[[TicketQuery(keywords=~mysql&status=!closed&group=milestone)]]

=== Typical Problems ===
[[TicketQuery(keywords=~mysql&resolution=worksforme&group=milestone)]]

(corresponding [query:keywords=~mysql&status=!closed&group=milestone custom query])