8.12.3.1 Using Symbolic Links for Databases on Unix
On Unix, the way to symlink a database is first to create a directory on some disk where you have free space and then to create a soft link to it from the MySQL data directory.
shell> mkdir /dr1/databases/test
shell> ln -s /dr1/databases/test /path/to/datadir
MySQL does not support linking one directory to multiple databases. Replacing a database directory with a symbolic link works as long as you do not make a symbolic link between databases. Suppose that you have a database db1
under the MySQL data directory, and then make a symlink db2
that points to db1
:
shell> cd /path/to/datadir
shell> ln -s db1 db2
The result is that, for any table tbl_a
in db1
, there also appears to be a table tbl_a
in db2
. If one client updates db1.tbl_a
and another client updates db2.tbl_a
, problems are likely to occur.