On Unix, the way to symlink a database is first to create a directory on some disk where you have free space and then to create a symlink to it from the MySQL data directory.

shell> mkdir /dr1/databases/test
shell> ln -s /dr1/databases/test /path/to/datadir

MySQL does not support linking one directory to multiple databases. Replacing a database directory with a symbolic link works as long as you do not make a symbolic link between databases. Suppose that you have a database db1 under the MySQL data directory, and then make a symlink db2 that points to db1:

shell> cd /path/to/datadir
shell> ln -s db1 db2

For any table tbl_a in db1, there also appears to be a table tbl_a in db2. If one client updates db1.tbl_a and another client updates db2.tbl_a, problems are likely to result.

However, if you really need to do this, it is possible by altering the source file mysys/my_symlink.c, in which you should look for the following statement:

if (!(MyFlags & MY_RESOLVE_LINK) ||
    (!lstat(filename,&stat_buff) && S_ISLNK(stat_buff.st_mode)))

Change the statement to this:

if (1)

Note that, in MySQL 5.0, symbolic link support is enabled by default for all Windows servers.