Installing and upgrading help

JdJEQ,

You may be right. I am not an expert on database server efficiency. But as for how to do it, that I can tell you. When you run the Moodle install script install.php, and it asks for your database type, username, password, database name, and table prefix, you just type the same database name for each installation, but a different prefix. The default prefix is MDL_. It is added on the left to the name of each table Moodle creates. That way, each Moodle will have its own set of tables within the same database.

At what point sharing a database with the tables of another Moodle installation would cause slower data transfer than having its tables in a separate database from the other installation, but both handled by the same database server, I do not know. The only thing I can think of that would be slower would be backing up the database, because it would be bigger. But you would still eventually have to back up both databases anyway.

RLE

CL,

You might be right. But if you are, it raises some questions:

1. What is the purpose of having table prefixes at all, if Moodle databases are not shared with anything else, including other Moodle installations?
2. I know that three of the four files you named are the table adodb_logsql. I suspect that if Moodle installations would fight over that table, the designer(s) of Moodle would have applied the prefix to it. I therefore suspect that their intension was for multiple Moodle installations to share that table.
3. I don't know what the fourth file is, but the name suggests it contains option settings that apply to the database as a whole.
4. I recently installed Moodle 1.8 on my PC for testing, etc. I haven't been able to do much with it yet (that's a separate issue), which might be why the adodb_logsql table on mine is empty. But for whatever it's worth, this is what it looks like:

mysql> select * from adodb_logsql;
Empty set (0.59 sec)

mysql> describe adodb_logsql;
+---------+---------------------+------+-----+----------+----------------+
| Field   | Type                | Null | Key | Default  | Extra          |
+---------+---------------------+------+-----+----------+----------------+
| id      | bigint(10) unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL     | auto_increment |
| created | datetime            | NO   |     |          |                |
| sql0    | varchar(250)        | NO   |     |          |                |
| sql1    | text                | YES  |     | NULL     |                |
| params  | text                | YES  |     | NULL     |                |
| tracer  | text                | YES  |     | NULL     |                |
| timer   | decimal(16,6)       | NO   |     | 0.000000 |                |
+---------+---------------------+------+-----+----------+----------------+
7 rows in set (0.16 sec)

RLE