Unfortunately, at first my FreeBSD development environment choked and didn't seem to allow a port install when an older version is still present. Think, think...

First of all, mysql-server would not install because of the wrong version of mysql-client which was present, and then when I tried to upgrade the client it shouted back to me that it: conflicts with installed packages. Think, think...

But wait a minute. By simply 'forcing' a deinstall with pkg_delete -f mysql-client-4.1.15 and then pkg_delete -f mysql-server-4.1.15 and then doing a make install clean for the client and then the server all over again, it worked!

Well, almost. In order to allow other applications to run correctly, it is necessary to do a make install clean for the MySQL 5.0 driver for the Perl DBI Database Interface: p5-DBD-mysql50-3.0002.

And then again, I later realized that my PHP4 and phpMyAdmin stuff were broken also. Drats. Deinstall and reinstall seemed to fix things alright. Maybe a bit of an overkill, but in the long term it probably would have taken me much much longer to figure out the better more elagant solution than just throw everything overboard and begin anew.

Rumor has it that with the new NDB storage engine that introduces a quantum leap in mulitcluster partitioning, e.g. built-in clustering and automatic failover capabilities, MySQL has grown-up to become a leading competitor in the cut-throat world of high-performance databases.

Will have to continue this further at another time.

Actually right now, I still have to do my Christmas shopping which one would imagine is much more important than fiddling around with my FreeBSD server farm with state-of-the-art database capabilities. Not.