MySQL: “Table ‘mysql.plugin’ doesn’t exist” after MySQL Upgrade

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). “SQL”, the abbreviation for Structured Query Language. A relational database organizes data into one or more data tables in which data types may be related to each other; these relations help structure the data. SQL is a language programmers use to create, modify and extract data from the relational database, as well as control user access to the database.

After running a MySQL upgrade, you can run into the following problem which prevents you from starting MySQL successfully.

Plugin 'ndbcluster' is disabled.
/usr/libexec/mysqld: Table 'mysql.plugin' doesn't exist

To fix the problem, we need to run mysql_upgrade, but in order to run that command, MySQL needs to be functioning. It’s most commonly caused by an old my.cnf config file, which could be solved like this.

 

# cp /etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf_backup
# cp /etc/my.cnf.rpmnew  /etc/my.cnf
# /etc/init.d/mysqld start