Using Symbolic Links for Tables on Unix

Using Symbolic Links for Tables on Unix ,

Symlinks are fully supported only for MyISAM tables. For files used by tables for other storage engines, you may get strange problems if you try to use symbolic links.

The handling of symbolic links for MyISAM tables works as follows:

->In the data directory, you always have the table format (.frm) file, the data (.MYD) file, and the index (.MYI) file. The data file and index file can be moved elsewhere and replaced in the data directory by symlinks. The format file cannot.

->You can symlink the data file and the index file independently to different directories.

->You can instruct a running MySQL server to perform the symlinking by using the DATA DIRECTORY and INDEX DIRECTORY options to CREATE TABLE.Alternatively, symlinking can be accomplished manually from the command line using ln -s if mysqld is not running.