Month: April 2011

Mosfilm Gold Collection on YouTube

Excellent news for all the fans of old Soviet movies: Mosfilm, one of the biggest movie studios in Russia, created a partner channel on YouTube.  They will upload a lot of the classics in full length, good quality, and with English subtitles.  Approximately 20 movies are already uploaded, and Mosfilm has promised to upload at least 5 full featured films every week.  By their own calculations, there will be more than 200 movies on that channel by the end of the 2011.  And all that content absolutely free!

MySQL export CSV into OUTFILE triggers “access denied” error

I came across a weird problem today.  Gladly, the web is full of solutions, but I’m going to post this anyway, just to have it nearby for the next time.  I needed to export the results of some query into a CSV file directly from MySQL.  I prepared my query, made sure that I can see the correct results and than changed it to export into the file. The query looked something like this:

SELECT id, field1, field2, field3
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/data.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
ESCAPED BY '\\'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
FROM data_table
WHERE field1 = 0;

I was quite surprised to find myself staring at:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘db_user’@’localhost’ (using password: YES)

My database user definitely had full access to the database.  I definitely could see the results of the query before the redirect to the file.  And I definitely had enough permissions to create files in /tmp directory.  And on top of that, I’m sure I used MySQL export functionality a gadzillion times and it always worked without any problems.   What’s wrong this time?

A quick search around got me to this Stack Overflow question.  Apparently, database user has to be given a FILE privilege, which is global (not per-database).   Here is what I did to solve the problem (you’ll need to use MySQL root user of course):

USE mysql;
UPDATE user SET File_priv = 'Y' WHERE User = 'db_user';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

I think that it worked for me before was because I exported as root, who does have this permission set to ‘Y’.