[Digikam-users] Request for a discussion of remote database capabilities in DigiKam 1.4...

[Martin Burnicki]

Hi,

Linuxguy123 wrote:
> Hi people.
>
> I've heard rumblings that DigiKam 1.4 is remote database capable.  When
> someone gets time (no rush) I'd like to hear about what it can do and
> how to set it up.

If you mean support for MySQL instead of SQLite only, this is very much 
appreciated. However, I have problems to use it with DK 1.4 under opensSUSE 
11.2 with KDE 4.5.1.

In the past I've use with DK with SQLite. Now the size of the digikam4.db file 
is about 165 MBytes, and if I make changes on a number of images which 
require changes to the database then this is very slow.

That's why I tried to use the new MySQL support. However, I've encountered 
some problems.

First I changed the settings to use MySQL instead of SQLite.

Under "Settings -> Configure digiKam" I click on the "Database" icon.

On the associated configuration page I select "MySQL" instead of "SQLite". and 
check the checkbox labelled "Internal Server".

When I click on the "Check DB Connection" button on the configuration page a 
dialog box pops up saying "Database connection test successful".

When I close the configuration menu another dialog pops up with a progress bar 
obviously showing how the database is converted. This finishes successfully, 
and after this all actions requiring changes to the database are *much* 
faster, as long as DK keeps running after the DB conversion.

However, if I stop and restart DK I always get an error popup saying:
"Error opening the database". 

If I start DK from a console window I see the messages like this in the 
console window:

digikam(30547)/digikam (core): Error while opening the database. Error details 
[ QSqlError(2002, "QMYSQL: Unable to connect", "Can't connect to local MySQL 
server through 
socket '/home/martin/.kde4/share/apps/digikam/db_misc/mysql.socket' (2)") ] 

So obviously the "internal" MySQL server is not running.

After clicking the cancel button DK starts, but I have to open DK's 
configuration menu again and see the setting is still "MySQL" as I've 
selected before, but the "Internal server" checkbox which i had checked in 
the previous step is now unchecked.

IMO this looks like a problem with the config file, or an entry in the config 
file telling whether the "internal server" checkbox has been checked, or not. 
Either this entry is not saved correctly when DK terminates, or is not read 
in correctly when DK starts again.

Eventually this may also be a problem with the path where DK and or KDE are 
assuming to save private data. In my openSUSE installation this is ~/.kde4, 
but in some other posts on this mailing lists I've seen people referring to 
~/.kde instead, so maybe different parts of DK (unintentionally) use 
different default paths for the kde directory.

Once this has been fixed it looks like using MySQL support can really speed up 
working with a large number of images.


Regards,

Martin