Flashes of Panic

Like most geeks, I have great love for O’Reilly, the publishing company which makes the greatest computer books about the best tools. My bookshelf here at work, aside from the strong tilt towards software boxes and sticky-noted reference copies of our own titles, looks like it was sponsored by O’Reilly.

Still, I need to administer a good hard kick to the kingfisher book, which did me wrong today. I had PHP installed. I had MySQL installed. I had Apache talking to PHP. But PHP couldn’t talk to MySQL. Why? I read, over and over, the fifteen or sixteen pages which discuss, in excruciating detail, the various permissions (on databases, tables, and columns) which can be granted or withheld on a per-user basis, and the command syntax for granting and revoking.

Nowhere in those fifteen pages did it mention the flush privileges command, which forces MySQL to reload the privilege settings. You need to issue that command before your changes take effect. I found that in, of all books, SAMS’ Teach Yourself MySQL in 21 Days.

I suppose I could have checked the online manual. But man, I trusted the kingfisher, and he let me down.

Now playing: Bodhisattva from A Decade of Steely Dan by Steely Dan