You can find out what the error code means by either examining the documentation for your system or by using the perror utility.

Some examples:

[root@mylinux ~]#perror 147
MySQL error code 147: Lock table is full; Restart program with a larger locktable

[root@mylinux ~]#perror 148
MySQL error code 148: Updates are not allowed under a read only transactions

You can run perror with many arguments:

[root@mylinux ~]#perror 147 148 149
MySQL error code 147: Lock table is full; Restart program with a larger locktable
MySQL error code 148: Updates are not allowed under a read only transactions
MySQL error code 149: Lock deadlock; Retry transaction

The perror utility can be helpful in many cases.

[root@mylinux ~]#perror --help

perror Ver 2.10, for redhat-linux-gnu (i386)
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL license

Print a description for a system error code or an error code from
a MyISAM/ISAM/BDB table handler.
If you want to get the error for a negative error code, you should use
-- before the first error code to tell perror that there was no more options.

Usage: perror [OPTIONS] [ERRORCODE [ERRORCODE...]]
-?, --help Displays this help and exits.
-I, --info Synonym for --help.
-s, --silent Only print the error message.
-v, --verbose Print error code and message (default).
-V, --version Displays version information and exits.

Variables (--variable-name=value)
and boolean options {FALSE|TRUE} Value (after reading options)
--------------------------------- -----------------------------
verbose TRUE

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