WordPress 2.9 was release somewhat recently and so like a good WP minion I logged into my site and clicked the update button. Error… uh oh. Apparently WordPress 2.9 requires a more recent version of MySQL (>= 4.1.2). My host installed MySQL 5 ages ago but I’ve never bothered with migrating to the new version because I didn’t have a reason to. Now I do. So here’s how my upgrade went.
First I made a full backup of both the web content and the MySQL database. The MySQL database backup was just a mysqldump command like so: