Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Under the
MariaDB
directory on Windows, there are four primary directories:
bin
,
data
,
lib
, and
include
. There are also several configuration examples and other
files under the MariaDB directory and a couple of additional directories (
docs
and
Share
), but we won't go into them here. The
bin
directory is where the
.exe
files.
of MariaDB are located. The
data
directory is where databases are stored; it is also
where the primary MariaDB configuration file,
my.ini
, is stored. We'll talk about
this file later in the
The MariaDB configuration file
section. The
lib
directory contains
various library and plugin files. Lastly, the
include
directory contains files useful for
application developers.
We don't need to worry about the
bin
,
lib
, and
include
directories, just be aware
that they exist and know what they contain. The data directory is where we'll spend
most of the time in this chapter.
Feel free to read the next section which explains the location of MariaDB files on
Linux systems, or jump ahead to the
The MariaDB configuration file
section.
Filesystem layout for Linux
On Linux distributions MariaDB follows the default filesystem layout available for
Linux. For example, MariaDB binaries are placed under
/usr/bin/
, libraries are
placed under
/usr/lib/
, manual pages are placed under
/usr/share/man/
, and
so on. However, there are some key MariaDB-specific directories and file locations
everyone should know about. Two of them have locations that are the same for the
systems based on
Advanced Package Tool
(
APT
) and
Yellow Dog Updater, Modified
(
YUM
). These locations are
/usr/share/mysql/
and
/var/lib/mysql/
respectively.
The
/usr/share/mysql/
directory contains helper scripts that are used during
the initial installation of MariaDB, translations (so we can have error and system
messages in different languages), and character set information. The
/var/lib/
mysql/
directory is the default location for our actual database data. We don't need
to worry about the contents of
/usr/share/mysql/
. It's enough to know that it
exists and contains important files. Also, there is not much need to worry about the
/var/lib/mysql/
directory. MariaDB will handle the contents of that directory
automatically; just know that it exists.
The next directory is where MariaDB plugins are stored. On Debian and Ubuntu
systems the directory is at the following location:
/usr/lib/mysql/plugin/
As with
/usr/share/mysql/
, we don't need to worry about the contents of
/usr/
lib/mysql/
. It's enough to know that it exists and contains important files. Also, if in
the future we install a new MariaDB plugin, this directory is where it will go.
