I also looked at MySql 5.6 when I upgraded to 14.04.  I actually used it for many months.  However I found that the Ubuntu packages were lagging far behind the source release when there were security updates.  So I decided, for the sake of my own sanity, to downgrade back to 5.5.  YMMV.

The point of using the innodb_file_per_table option is that it becomes easier to reclaim space in the innodb file.  Instead of dumping and re-importing all the databases to reclaim space you only have to do that with a few tables.

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 10:06 AM, Paul A <paul.a@navalmarinearchive.com> wrote:
At 04:05 PM 9/17/2015 +0200, Stefano Bargioni wrote:
+1 for "default in some newer versions".
sb
Robin Sheat writes:
Paul A schreef op vr 11-09-2015 om 18:37 [-0400]:
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 1302331392 Sep 11 17:45 ibdata1
This is solved by using this option:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-parameters.html#sysvar_innodb_file_per_table
which I'd recommend setting. It seems like it might be a default in some
newer versions.

When we upgraded our servers earlier this year (12.04LTS to 14.04LTS) we tried upgrading to MySQL 5.6 (from 5.5.44). Time did not permit sorting out all the glitches (notably date/timestamps which produced hard errors, but from memory there were a few more details) which involved Koha as well as other db's on the same servers.

We did try the innodb_file_per_table in 5.5 (but you have to ALTER all the tables to get the benefits) and the sum total of all the individual files was a little bigger than the original ibdata1 -- so whatever the other benefits might have been, "spacesaving" (which was my original reply) was not one of them.

YMMV ... and upgrading to 5.6 is still very much on my "jobs to do" list.

Paul



--
Michael Hafen
Washington County School District Technology Department
Systems Analyst