Last week I was looking at testing SplashID Enterprise. While a first installation with the MySQL database running on a Mac Mini was working fine, the installation with the Splash Enterprise Admin client failed when the database was running on a default Linux (CentOS) installation. I tried contacting SplashData support, but they could not help me, so I tried to debug myself. I enabled the query log so I could see the queries executed by the Admin client. These queries showed that SplashID ran queries reffering to specific tables in upper case (eg. MYSQL.USER). I manually tried some of these queries and these queries failed with “unknown table” error.

Now I found the problem, I thought it was easy to fix it. I just had to make MySQL case-insensitive. This sounds easier than it actually was 🙂 Lots of articles talked about the character set and the collation, but these only affect the data in the tables, not the actual table name itself. Some googling let met to the lower_case_table_names setting in MySQL. It appears that Windows, Unix and MacOSX all have different default settings, and therefor behave differently.

Setting the following line in the my.cnf in the [mysqld] section solved my case problem with SplashID. MySQL now changes all table names to lower case.

lower_case_table_names=1


Update: I have not tested SplashID Enterprise yet, so I don’t know if it is any good 🙂