Extra system tables in MySQL 4.1

[TonyGroves]

Does anybody know what all the extra system tables in MySQL 4.1 are for?

The extra tables are:[tt]
+---------------------------+
| Tables_in_mysql |
+---------------------------+
| help_category |
| help_keyword |
| help_relation |
| help_topic |
| time_zone |
| time_zone_leap_second |
| time_zone_name |
| time_zone_transition |
| time_zone_transition_type |
+---------------------------+
[/tt]
The "help" tables contain brief help about SQL syntax; the "time_zone" tables are empty.

 

[sleipnir214]

A search query of time zone at MySQL's site turned up:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Time_zone_support.html

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[TonyGroves]

That explains the time-zone tables, thanks.

I still can't find anything about the help tables though. It's probably safe to get rid of them, but I'd like to be sure.

 

[sleipnir214]

As a general rule, unless you know for certain that you should delete something, you should not delete that something.



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[TonyGroves]

I can't find anything about this in the manual, but it looks like the "help" tables are used by the "mysql" client program; for instance the command help truncate; will dump the contents of the 'truncate' help-topic record. It seems that deleting the tables just results in an error message when you issue a "help topic" commmand.

 

[MorganGreylock]

Rather than deleting them, move them to another folder or simply rename them, then fire it up and see what happens. You should never delete anything you're not absolutely sure that you can delete, (like sleipnir214 said) but you can play with it to see what impact moving or renaming it has. Maybe its just man pages, maybe its some internal thing that will make your system blow up. But, if you keep copies of it, you can (hopefully) just put them back in place and then (again hopefully) everything will come back up as normal.

Remember the recycle bin... its the last chance that some people have from making very stupid mistakes.

Don't delete... rename to xxxxxx.zzz (put it to sleep) and see what happens.

MG