Beginning with MySQL 3.23.16, the mysqld-max and mysql-max-nt servers for Windows are compiled with the -DUSE_SYMDIR option. This enables you to put a database directory on a different disk by setting up a symbolic link to it. This is similar to the way that symbolic links work on Unix, although the procedure for setting up the link is different.

It is necessary to define USE_SYMDIR explicitly only before MySQL 4.0; for mysqld-max and mysql-max-nt, you can enable symbolic links by using the --symbolic-links option. As of MySQL 4.0, symbolic links are enabled by default for all Windows servers. If you do not need them, you can disable them with the --skip-symbolic-links option.

On Windows, create a symbolic link to a MySQL database by creating a file in the data directory that contains the path to the destination directory. The file should be named db_name.sym, where db_name is the database name.

Suppose that the MySQL data directory is C:\mysql\data and you want to have database foo located at D:\data\foo. Set up a symlink using this procedure:

After this, all tables created in the database foo are created in D:\data\foo. Note that the symbolic link is not used if a directory with the same name as the database exists in the MySQL data directory.