MySQL 64-bit Mac OS-X Lion status shows “i386”

Question

I'm trying to get mysqldb running on OSX Lion 10.7.3 and I've installed 64-bit Python, but am having trouble getting the 64-bit version of mysql installed.

I've downloaded and installed the 64-bit dmg file here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Mac OS X ver. 10.6 (x86, 64-bit), DMG Archive       5.5.21  111.7M  

I installed the .pkg file in the dmg, the startupitem, and the prefPane files. I added these lines into my .bash_profile:

alias mysql='/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql'

alias mysqladmin='/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin'

but when I check the status in mysql:

mysql> status;
--------------
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.21, for osx10.6 (i386) using readline 5.1

Why does it say i386, and not x64?

I've even removed mysql using:

sudo rm /usr/local/mysql
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/My*
rm -rf ~/Library/PreferencePanes/My*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MySQL*
sudo rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.mysql.*
sudo vim /etc/hostconfig # and remove the line MYSQLCOM=-YES-

and reinstalled the dmg and still the status reads "i386".

Answer 1

What does Activity Viewer say about the running mysqld? IIRC, it will tell you whether a running process is 32-bit or 64-bit.

Just because the access client is 32-bit doesn't mean that the server process necessarily will be.

Answer 2

mysql is a trivial command line tool. it is higly unlikely to need more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. 32bit code is more compact, maybe saves some buck while loading from the net. You can always compile yourself...