Nasty Acrobat Organizer Error Solved
May 16th, 2007 by Lou
For some time my Acrobat 7 Professional installation on my Mac has thrown an error on initial access to the Organizer (File menu option Organizer) “Could not initialize Organizer database”. I recently upgraded to Acrobat 8, and the problem persisted.
After at least a week of extended dialog with Adobe support that was going nowhere, I decided to see if I could figure out what was going on.
Based on a Google search, I figured it must have something to do with a conflict between my Acrobat installation’s embedded mysql instance and the mysql instance I had installed on my machine.
I had an /etc/my.cnf file to force my instance to use InnoDB by default. The Acrobat embedded mysql instance was picking this up, causing it to die, since it apparently lacks InnoDB bits.
The solution is to move /etc/my.cnf elsewhere. I moved mine to the mysql data directory for my instance, /usr/local/mysql/data/ where my instance picks it up, but the Acrobat instance does not.
acrobat, adobe, bug, mysql, organizer
Thank you . . . I have had this same problem for over 2 years and had not figured out that it was mysql cnf causing the problem. This was a life saver :)
It would appear to me that even by moving the global options file from /etc/my.cnf to /usr/local/mysql/data/ that the compiled options for the embedded mysqld and mysqladmin is still reading the options file in /usr/local/mysql/data. Not sure why, but you can check by running:
“/Applications/Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional/Adobe Acrobat Professional.app/Contents/MacOS/mysqld” –no-defaults –verbose –help
What it shows for me is:
Default options are read from the following files in the given order: /etc/my.cnf /usr/local/mysql/data/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf
SO… what I did (your milage my vary) is rename the embedded mysqld and mysqladmin to mysqld.old and mysqladmin.old and then create the following 2 scripts mysqld and mysqladmin in their stead:
#!/bin/sh “$0.old” –no-defaults “$@”
This executes mysqld.old and mysqladmin.old with the additional flag –no-defaults ignoring any my.cnf files that happen to be on your system and use only the compiled in defaults.
It would appear to me to be a gross oversight on the part of Adobe to have the embedded mysqld read a global options file or any options file other than one it supplies OR it should be passing in –no-defaults when invoking the embedded server instance.
For those curious, the command line options getting passed to mysqld are:
–skip-networking –socket=/Users/[your name here]/Library/ Caches/Acrobat/8.0_ppc/Organizer70 –skip-grant-tables –skip-innodb –myisam-re cover –lower_case_table_names=1 –tmpdir=/Users/[your name here]/Library/Caches/Acrobat/8.0_ ppc/ –datadir=/Users/[your name here]/Library/Acrobat User Data/8.0_ppc/ –language=/Applica tions/Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional/Adobe Acrobat Professional.app/Contents/MacOS /
Command line options being passed to mysqladmin (apparently when you shut down Acrobat) are:
–socket=/Users/ben/Library/Caches/Acrobat /8.0_ppc/Organizer70 shutdown
Well… all my hyphen hypens for the command line options got changed to en-dashes by the blog, but you should be able to adjust as necessary.
Thanks, Benjamin. Editing code snippets on Wordpress is a pain.
Benjamin, one note regarding the my.cnf. I moved the my.cnf file for my configuration, not the configuration for the embedded Adobe mysql. I placed my configuration in the data directory for my database, and that data directory was not the one used by the Adobe mysql engine. That’s why moving the my.cnf worked for me: the Adobe mysql engine should never find it.
[…] Adobe has a custom MySQL server rolled with Acrobat Professional for some reason but it has been compiled and executed in such a way that it conflicts with a native MySQL server if you have one installed. Luckily, and after much googling I was able to find a posted fix. […]