To compile just the MySQL client libraries and client programs and not the server, use the --without-server option:

shell> ./configure --without-server

If you have no C++ compiler, mysql cannot be compiled (it is the one client program that requires C++). In this case, you can remove the code in configure that tests for the C++ compiler and then run ./configure with the --without-server option. The compile step should still try to build mysql, but you can ignore any warnings about mysql.cc. (If make stops, try make -k to tell it to continue with the rest of the build even if errors occur.)

If you want to build the embedded MySQL library (libmysqld.a), use the --with-embedded-server option.

If you don't want your log files and database directories located under /usr/local/var, use a configure command something like one of these:

shell> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql
shell> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local \
           --localstatedir=/usr/local/mysql/data

The first command changes the installation prefix so that everything is installed under /usr/local/mysql rather than the default of /usr/local. The second command preserves the default installation prefix, but overrides the default location for database directories (normally /usr/local/var) and changes it to /usr/local/mysql/data.

You can also specify the locations at server startup time by using a MySQL option file. See Section 4.3.2, “Using Option Files”.

If you are using Unix and you want the MySQL socket file location to be somewhere other than the default location (normally in the directory /tmp or /var/run), use a configure command like this:

shell> ./configure \
           --with-unix-socket-path=/usr/local/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock

The socket filename must be an absolute pathname. You can also change the location of mysql.sock at server startup by using a MySQL option file. See Section A.4.5, “How to Protect or Change the MySQL Unix Socket File”.

If you want to compile statically linked programs (for example, to make a binary distribution, to get better performance, or to work around problems with some Red Hat Linux distributions), run configure like this:

shell> ./configure --with-client-ldflags=-all-static \
           --with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static

If you are using gcc and don't have libg++ or libstdc++ installed, you can tell configure to use gcc as your C++ compiler:

shell> CC=gcc CXX=gcc ./configure

When you use gcc as your C++ compiler, it does not attempt to link in libg++ or libstdc++. This may be a good thing to do even if you have those libraries installed. Some versions of them have caused strange problems for MySQL users in the past.

The following list indicates some compilers and environment variable settings that are commonly used with each one.

In most cases, you can get a reasonably optimized MySQL binary by using the options from the preceding list and adding the following options to the configure line:

--prefix=/usr/local/mysql --enable-assembler \
--with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static

The full configure line would, in other words, be something like the following for all recent gcc versions:

CFLAGS="-O3 -mpentiumpro" CXX=gcc CXXFLAGS="-O3 -mpentiumpro \
-felide-constructors -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" ./configure \
--prefix=/usr/local/mysql --enable-assembler \
--with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static

The binaries we provide on the MySQL Web site at https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ are all compiled with full optimization and should be perfect for most users. See Section 2.1.2.5, “MySQL Binaries Compiled by MySQL AB”. There are some configuration settings you can tweak to build an even faster binary, but these are only for advanced users. See Section 7.5.4, “How Compiling and Linking Affects the Speed of MySQL”.

If the build fails and produces errors about your compiler or linker not being able to create the shared library libmysqlclient.so.N (where N is a version number), you can work around this problem by giving the --disable-shared option to configure. In this case, configure does not build a shared libmysqlclient.so.N library.

By default, MySQL uses the latin1 (cp1252 West European) character set. To change the default set, use the --with-charset option:

shell> ./configure --with-charset=CHARSET

CHARSET may be one of big5, cp1251, cp1257, czech, danish, dec8, dos, euc_kr, gb2312, gbk, german1, hebrew, hp8, hungarian, koi8_ru, koi8_ukr, latin1, latin2, sjis, swe7, tis620, ujis, usa7, or win1251ukr. See Section 5.10.1, “The Character Set Used for Data and Sorting”.

The default collation may also be specified. MySQL uses the latin1_swedish_ci collation by default. To change this, use the --with-collation option:

shell> ./configure --with-collation=COLLATION

To change both the character set and the collation, use both the --with-charset and --with-collation options. The collation must be a legal collation for the character set. (Use the SHOW COLLATION statement to determine which collations are available for each character set.)

If you want to convert characters between the server and the client, you should use the SET NAMES statement. See Section 13.5.3, “SET Syntax”, and Section 10.4, “Connection Character Sets and Collations”.

Warning: If you change character sets after having created any tables, you must run myisamchk -r -q --set-collation=collation_name on every table. Your indexes may be sorted incorrectly otherwise. This can happen if you install MySQL, create some tables, and then reconfigure MySQL to use a different character set and reinstall it.

With the configure option --with-extra-charsets=LIST, you can define which additional character sets should be compiled into the server. LIST is one of the following:

To configure MySQL with debugging code, use the --with-debug option:

shell> ./configure --with-debug

This causes a safe memory allocator to be included that can find some errors and that provides output about what is happening. See Section E.1, “Debugging a MySQL Server”.

If your client programs are using threads, you must compile a thread-safe version of the MySQL client library with the --enable-thread-safe-client configure option. This creates a libmysqlclient_r library with which you should link your threaded applications. See Section 25.2.15, “How to Make a Threaded Client”.

It is possible to build MySQL with large table support using the --with-big-tables option.

This option causes the variables used to keep table row counts to be stored using unsigned long long rather than unsigned long. What this does is to allow tables to hold up to approximately 1.844E+19 ((2³²)²) rows rather than 2³² (~4.295E+09) rows. Previously it was necessary to pass -DBIG_TABLES to the compiler manually in order to enable this feature.

Options that pertain to particular operating systems can be found in the system-specific section of this manual. See Section 2.12, “Operating System-Specific Notes”.