MySQL

Goals for 2011

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Well, a couple of weeks into the New Year, and it’s time for the usual Resolutions. So what are mine this year? While some I am keeping to myself, I’m happy to share a few techie ones.

In no particular order I intend to do/get the following:

  • Obtain a Macbook (Air / Pro)
  • Learn how to program the iPhone / iPad
  • Get a tablet PC (iPad possibly or Windows 7 based one – we shall see)
  • New Digital camera to replace the now aging Canon EOS350 (my current one has suffered from being in -28°C and +40°C in its working life)
  • Get this Blog back up and running doing the following:
    1. Reviewing iPhone Apps – on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3G
    2. Document insights into MySQL from the servers I manage
  • Get to grips (finally) with OOP and PHP (come on, I know JAVA so I really should have cracked this already but the old C programming gets in the way)
  • Have a dabble in Cloud Computing – it seems to be here to stay, and since 2010 had virtualization, 2011 is Cloud 🙂

That’s it for now – check back to see how I do!

Mysql Error: Error 13 – Can’t get stat of

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Error of the day:

I had a script that used LOAD DATA INFILE to load data from a CSV file into a MySQL database table. It worked fine before, but after six months, I needed to use it again—and suddenly, this error kept appearing:

ERROR 13 (HY000): Can't get stat of ‘/var/lib/mysql/database/file.frm’ (Errcode: 13)

 checked the script, verified that the file existed, and everything seemed fine… so what had changed?

It turns out that a few months ago, we had separated our servers, meaning MySQL now runs on a separate machine. Because of this, LOAD DATA INFILE could no longer find the file as it wasn’t stored locally on the MySQL server.

Solution:

To resolve this, I had to use:


LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE

This command allows the client (in this case, a PHP-based server) to access the file and then pipe it to the MySQL server.

The frustrating part of troubleshooting this was that most solutions online pointed to file permissions issues, when in reality, the problem was that the SQL server was remote and couldn’t access the file directly.

Important Note:
Due to security settings, you cannot usually use LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE if the file is stored on the same server as MySQL. In such cases, you still need to use:


LOAD DATA INFILE

Hope this helps someone else in the future who runs into the same issue!

Copyright Michael Helm 2026.
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