@Vlad .. we have discussed that already - but the main reason is another: With UAC ('user account control') ON on Vista and higher even an admin user cannot write to 'program files' unless progeam is started with explicit admin privilege. If server is isntalle to \program files and a user starts the server from command line *as a user*(NOTE: an admin user does not neccesarily have admin privileges with UAC on) all writes will to to user's \virtualstore folder - what means that database files will be duplicated: one copy for 'system' and one for 'user.
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Please try to understand the differences between WIndows 2000/XP/2003 on one side and Vista/2008/win7 on the other. I am referring to UAC. If you never used any Windows version higher than XP .. well then .. accept the limitation of your experience.
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There will need an option for user to specify bot 'basedir' and 'datadir' independently. default 'basedir' should be 'program files' - default datadir should be 'AppData'.
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This is the (mine) bug report where this discussion started in MySQL context:
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Peter
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On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 18:40, Vladislav Vaintroub
<wlad@sun.com> wrote:
> This might scare away non-technically-savy users - in Windows XP the
> windows
> explorer app won't even show the contents of C:\Program Files\, instead
> it
> will show a message telling you that this is a folder with system files
> that
> you shouldn't mess with.
I hope you do not want to store data files in Program Files. This location
is first, restricted for use by the (elevated) Administrators only and
second, it is there to store executables and shared libraries and maybe even
readonly data from the installation.
Program data like databases are to be stored somewhere else, "echo
%ProgramData%" might give a hint to the correct folder:)