Install MySQL 5.7.38 from source on Oracle Linux 8

This is a follow up to my earlier post about installing various MySQL versions from source:

https://www.bobbydurrettdba.com/2019/05/22/mysql-source-installs-for-each-rds-version/

So, I am an Oracle database administrator. I have been for about 30 years starting with Oracle 7. But for the past few years we have been supporting MySQL in Amazon Web Services’ RDS version. Unfortunately, we have been forced to embrace the Aurora version of MySQL also which is proprietary to Amazon and does not have the full source code. But we still have several vanilla MySQL RDS instances that we support.

Working with Oracle for so many years I have tried to learn about its internals – how does it really work? This is difficult because I do not have access to Oracle’s source code and even if I did, I probably do not have enough years remaining in my life to ever fully understand it. Still, the idea of working with the MySQL community edition version that we have the full source code to has always intrigued me. This is similar to my fascination with the antique computer game Nethack that I play in a character-based mode exploring a dungeon and fighting monsters. It is a good game, but more importantly, I have the full source code.

Who knows? Maybe when we are working with MySQL we will run across a bug, and I will be able to dig into the part of the code that has the bug and it will help me figure out how to solve the problem. With Oracle it is always a guess what is going on. It can be an educated guess based on what Oracle reveals through various traces and logs. But maybe even though I do not have the time and motivation to be a hardcore MySQL internals developer there could be a situation where having the source code will help.

So, that leads me to want to download the exact version of the MySQL source code that we are using on AWS RDS and compile it, link it, install it on a test VM on the chance that someday I will need a working test MySQL database of the same version as one that is having a problem in production.

Things have changed since my 5/22/2019 post about setting up this kind of environment. At that time, I was working with an Oracle Linux 7 VM running on my work laptop with all its firewalls and Zscaler and all between my VM and the internet. Today I am using Oracle Linux 8 running on a VM on a personal laptop which is on my home network so there is nothing in the way of my downloading things from the internet like Linux rpm packages. One of the side effects of COVID-19 is that I am working from home full time. Also, not due to COVID, my middle daughter moved out leaving her bedroom open to be converted to an office. So, I have two “desks” setup with two laptops and big monitors on both. My home laptop sits to my left and I can run VirtualBox VMs on it without being on our corporate network. This is great for testing where I just need to setup a technology and I do not need or even want access to something on our corporate network.

So, with all this prelude let me tell you some of the things I had to do to get the MySQL 5.7.38 source code compiled on my Oracle Linux 8 VM.

I cloned a OEL 8 VM that I already had and then updated the packages. I think I used yum instead of dnf which was dumb, but it worked.

Once I had an up-to-date OEL 8 environment I had to get the source tree for MySQL with the right commit point for 5.7.38. I was following this document:

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/installing-development-tree.html

I ran these git commands:

git clone https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server.git

git checkout 5.7

git pull

This gets 5.7.38:

git checkout c94ce78

I installed Boost and Cmake like what I did in the earlier post. I got the rest of the development tools like gcc, make, bison in place using this dnf command:

dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"

Then I had to get the cmake command to work:

cmake . -DWITH_BOOST=/home/bobby/boost_1_59_0

I had to install several packages before I could get this to run without errors. I had to enable the “CodeReady Builder” repository in the file oracle-linux-ol8.repo:

[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# diff oracle-linux-ol8.repo oracle-linux-ol8.repo.06212023
20c20
< enabled=1
---
> enabled=0

[ol8_codeready_builder]
name=Oracle Linux 8 CodeReady Builder ($basearch) - Unsupported
baseurl=https://yum$ociregion.$ocidomain/repo/OracleLinux/OL8/codeready/builder/$basearch/
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

Once that repository was enabled, I was able to add the needed packages.

dnf install ncurses-devel
dnf install libtirpc-devel
dnf install rpcgen

Eventually I realized that after messing with adding the new repository and packages I needed to go back and clean everything up and run cmake again:

make clean
rm CMakeCache.txt
cmake . -DWITH_BOOST=/home/bobby/boost_1_59_0
make
su -
make install

Other than that, it is just the normal steps to create the database and run it, which I think is documented in my earlier post and in the MySQL docs.

I thought it couldn’t hurt to document the things I had to do if nothing else for myself. I use this blog as a reference for myself, so it is not just something for other people to read. Anyway, I’m glad I could get this down and maybe someone else will benefit.

Bobby