MySQL: “Table ‘mysql.plugin’ doesn’t exist” after MySQL Upgrade

Posted on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 by Matti

After running a MySQL upgrade, you can run into the following problem which prevents you from starting MySQL successfully.

101126 10:29:53 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql

101126 10:29:53 [Note] Plugin ‘ndbcluster’ is disabled.

/usr/libexec/mysqld: Table ‘mysql.plugin’ doesn’t exist

101126 10:29:53 [ERROR] Can’t open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it.

101126 10:29:53 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 1 3337694676

101126 10:29:53 [ERROR] Can’t open and lock privilege tables: Table ‘mysql.servers’ doesn’t exist

101126 10:29:53 [ERROR] Column count of mysql.db is wrong. Expected 22, found 20. Created with MySQL 50045, now running 50153. Please use mysql_upgrade to fix this error.

…

101126 10:29:41 InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 1 3337694676

This is a real chicken and egg problem. To fix the problem, we need to run mysql_upgrade, but in order to run that command, MySQL needs to be functioning. And it won’t do that, until mysql_upgrade is run. Humpf.

It’s most commonly caused by an old my.cnf config file, which could be solved like this.

# cp /etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf_backup

# cp /etc/my.cnf.rpmnew /etc/my.cnf

# /etc/init.d/mysqld start

The reason is because in MySQL 5.0, a config variable named “skip-bdb” would exist in the my.cnf, which was removed in MySQL 5.1. Alternatively, you could comment out the “skip-bdb” parameter in the my.cnf, and try restarting MySQL. A bugreport has already been filed.

After which you need to run the mysql_upgrade.

# mysql_upgrade -u <user> -p

Alternatives to check, if the above does not work, is:

Are all files in /var/lib/mysql (or whatever your MySQL datadir is), owned by mysql?

Are there old logfiles in /var/lib/mysql named “ib_logfile0″ or “ib_logfile1″? If so; rename them, and try restarting MyS

viaMySQL: “Table ‘mysql.plugin’ doesn’t exist” after MySQL Upgrade ~ Mattias Geniar.