�MySQL on Win32 with Errnum 13, Errno 144�
2003-10-20, 15:15:00:

MySQL on Windows is an excellent product if you are writing your own apps at work and need SQL but don't need the complexity or cost of some more heavyweight alternatives like Oracle or SQL Server. I use it extensively for apps at work that collect data or have a large number of read-only transactions with the user.

Today, though, I was trying to remove some tables from a database (mySQL version 3.23.54-nt), and the tables couldn't be dropped - it kept giving me an error with a cryptic "errnum 13".

Odd, I thought to myself. Everything was working like a charm earlier. Even odder was that I could query them, insert data into them, update them... I just couldn't drop them.

Eventually, I had the bright idea to try to run an Analyze against the table in phpMyAdmin, and was met with yet another error: "Can't open file: 'oldapps.MYD'. (errno: 144)".

Enlightenment hit.

I browsed to the database server, and saw that the directory that contained that database's tables were entered into had become capitalized. Don't ask me how, don't ask me why, but once I renamed it back to "apps" from "Apps", everything started working.

For most file operations, Windows doesn't care about case sensitivity. However, in my coding I have often noticed slight variations of this depending upon the particular Win32 call that is being used.

For those of us from a *nix background, we grok the case sensitivity issue, but for Windows users, it's often a very opaque issue. Therefore, heed my warning and make sure you preserve your cases, at least with ported open-source software! Details can come back to bite you.