Gnucash in "MySQL server has gone away" loop

[John Ralls]

On Oct 4, 2011, at 5:45 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 09:08:42PM -0700, John Ralls wrote:
> 
>> Googling the error, it appears that perhaps we're being too
>> aggressive in batching the slots query, so that the response is
>> bigger than can be accommodated without tuning the database (which
>> the stacktrace crowd says must be done at both ends). Odd that the
>> newer version croaks silently.
> 
> My previous experience with MySQL and libraries that use it is that it
> is not at all odd that the library would croak silently, change your
> datatype or even data silently, or fail to register things and not
> tell you about it.  
> 
> Could the confusion here be a mismatch in the setup of MySQL?  Does
> GNUCash check that MySQL actually supports transactions on all the
> tables it is using?  The only practical way to ensure that is to
> ensure that MyISAM isn't supported at all.
> 
> The problem with MySQL is that not all its table types support
> transactions.  If you include a non-transactional table in a
> transaction and a failure happens on that table, the behaviour is
> surprising.  Note that by default on most distributions, MySQL comes
> with MyISAM enabled.
> 

Gnucash doesn't check anything except the libdbi bug on big numbers. That's a pretty big hole in MySql, though, that it can be naively configured to not be ACID compliant.

Regards,
John Ralls