Two errors from a shared MySQL logbook, both fatal to the schema and neither
naming its cause:
CREATE INDEX … ON qso(state) → 1170 BLOB/TEXT column used in key
specification without a key length
op_name TEXT … DEFAULT '' → 1101 TEXT column can't have a default value
One root cause. TEXT columns are rewritten to VARCHAR(255) when they are indexed
or carry a default — that is exactly what those two MySQL rules require — but the
pattern only matched a BARE column name. The SQLite baseline dump quotes its
identifiers, and mysqlDDL turns those quotes into backticks before the TEXT rules
run, so every column coming from the baseline kept its TEXT type and MySQL
rejected the schema.
The operator saw none of this: just "MySQL is enabled but the connection failed
at startup" and a silent fallback to local SQLite — which is the worst shape for
a shared logbook, because each operator then logs into their own copy.
The pattern now accepts a quoted or bare name and puts the quoting back. A test
covers both forms, plus the case that must NOT change: an unindexed column stays
TEXT, since VARCHAR everywhere would break MySQL's row-size limit. Reverting the
one-line change makes it fail.
An operator reported migrations being very slow and sent a log with three
interleaved runs — and no way to tell one database migrated three times from
three databases migrated once. Each line now carries its target: the SQLite file
name, mysql:<database>, or baseline:memory for the in-memory pass that derives
the schema for a FRESH MySQL database (that one is fast and is not a real
database — in the report it sat between two slow runs and looked like a third).
A pass also announces how many migrations it will apply, so a run that applies
nothing is visibly distinct from one that does.
A QSO with a non-Latin character (Cyrillic Я = \xD0\xAF, Polish ł, …) failed to
save on the shared MySQL backend with "Error 1366: Incorrect string value …
for column 'qso'.'address'". Cause: the database had been pre-created by a
hosting panel (o2switch/cPanel) as latin1, so OpsLog's CREATE DATABASE IF NOT
EXISTS … utf8mb4 was a no-op and every table inherited latin1 — which can't
store those letters, even over a utf8mb4 connection.
OpenMySQL now runs ensureMySQLUTF8MB4 after migrations: ALTER DATABASE to
utf8mb4 (for future tables) + CONVERT any table with a non-utf8mb4 text column
via an information_schema probe. Idempotent and cheap on a healthy DB (the probe
returns nothing → no ALTERs); best-effort so a charset issue never blocks
logbook access. SQLite is unaffected.
rouggy