Learning the internals of MySQL

I've been playing with MySQL recently, most of my data base work has been with MS SQLServer. But I need a less expensive solution for one of my pet projects, MySQL fits perfectly.

I want to really understand the internals, so I'm actually buiding the source code. So far there have been a few hurdles to jump. But ultimately my goal is to compile and debug completely on windows.

#1 for non Linux developers (that don't work at MySQL), you have to use Bitkeeper's free Linux client to download the code.

I'm primarily a Windows developer so I wanted to avoid putting cgywin on my main dev box. No problem right? Just use linux in a virtual machine, I have VMware pro. that should work. I tried several vmware linux appliances, every one I tried wouldn't boot up or had some other catasrophic problem.

Finally I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu in a virtual machine, it works perfectly. In fact I'm close to taking Vista (I HATE VISTA!) off my laptop and going to Ubuntu.

So I got the latest version of the code downloaded. I was able to compile and test it from inside of the VM. One step closer to my goal. Next I copied the source to my Windows dev box.

#2 Build the .sln project file so Visual Studio can build the project. I install CMake, and Bison no problem. So I run win\config

C:\Work\MySQL\mysql60\sql>win\configure WITH_INNOBASE_STORAGE_ENGINE WITH_PARTITION_STORAGE_ENGINE MYSQL_SERVER_SUFFIX=-pro

then I run: win\build-vs8.bat and an error occurs in Configure.data
a bug has already been entered for this, but it appears that the fix has yet to be added to the source tree. Edit the file and continue on. Now we have a .sln file.

#3 Even though the docs say they are building a VS 2008 .sln file VS wants to convert it from 2005. This happens with minor issues.

#4 Ok, now we're compiling..... Oh crap there's a compile "error '_vsnprintf': attributes inconsistent with previous declaration" several of them. Looks like Microsoft decided to define _vsnprintf in the newest version of stdio.h. For now I just revert to VS 2005 and everything compiles fine.

--More to come--