Can't connect Jira to existing confluence MySQL instance

[Kyle Johnson]

I'm trying to install Jira Service Desk on our confluence server. I would like to use the existing MySQL instance. According to this page https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/connecting-jira-applications-to-mysql-5-7-966063305.html

I am able to do that. When I try to connect to the database during setup it will not let me. It says "This MySQL instance is not properly configured. Please follow the documentation for MySQL 5.7+ setup." 

I'm using MySQL 5.7.23 for confluence with no issues, I created a new schema and new users with the correct permissions.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Kyle,

I see that you have Confluence already setup and working with a MySQL 5.7 database, and want to create a new database to use with Jira Server.  However there is a potential conflict here with this approach.  Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here.

If you look closing at the setup guides for both Confluence and Jira for connecting to MySQL, you can see that each recommends setting different values for character-set-server in the [mysqld] section:

Confluence:

[mysqld]
...
character-set-server=utf8

Jira:

[mysqld]
...
character_set_server=utf8mb4

The problem here is that this setting spans across the SQL server here.  In turn, fixing this for Jira could cause unexpected results for Confluence.  Currently Confluence does not yet officially support utf8mb4, Jira 8.0 was the first version of Jira Server to add support for utf8mb4.  This let's Jira store 4 byte characters in MySQL, something it long lacked the ability to do in MySQL databases. 

Confluence has a bug ticket tracking this in CONFSERVER-18509.  Should this be resolved, then I think it would be possible to have a single MySQL server that could then host 2 separate database for both Jira and Confluence.

In the meantime, I would recommend setting up a separate MySQL server just for Jira.  Sorry that probably is not the answer you were hoping for here, but until the two products have correlating database-wide settings, it doesn't really seem feasible otherwise.

Cheers,

Andy