I had a bit of a problem today trying to get an 8Mb backup uploaded into MySQL. The problem was caused by the fact that phpMyAdmin was timing out when I tried to import the database. I tried breaking it down into smaller sections but a couple of the tables just had too many rows in them. Just as I was about to bang my head against the wall, I came across BigDump, a MySQL upload tool that staggers the uploads allowing you to upload dump files up to 50Mb in size.

WordPress runs on PHP and MySQL, which is available both on Linux servers and on Windows servers. It’s worth keeping in mind that there are a few differences between the two platforms, even though there aren’t supposed to be.

Up to a couple of years ago, the main difference was that it was hard to use Permalinks on Windows without workarounds, but that functionality has been built in now. The differences are a bit more subtle, but they’re still there. I just spent the morning debugging an issue with WP Auctions, an auction plugin for WordPress which turned out to be buried deep in the way MySQL works. The problem was that Linux implementation of MySQL use MyISAM as a storage engine, while Windows implementations use InnoDB. I found a slight difference in the way Decimals are handled (InnoDB doesn’t allow Nulls in decimal fields) which was causing the create of new auctions to fail.

The morals of the story is that if you’re in the minority using WordPress on Windows, make sure you test your installation and any plugins you use, instead of assuming they’re just going to work. It’s a different situation to going our and buying classroom desks which you know are sturdy and work in different environments. Code tends to be a bit more fragile; and plugin developers don’t always have alternative platforms to test their work on.