Unable to store voicemails when using realtime mysql

i’m running asterisk 1.2.9.1
everything worked fine until i decided to move the cdr and voicemail.conf
stuff into mysql.

i put my extensions in voicemail_users and changed the
extconfig.conf table to include
voicemail => mysql, astvm, voicemail_users

when i call to leave a msg, the cdr gets recorded properly and the voicemsg
gets emailed to me, but there is no voicemsg stored locally[or in the
voicemessages table]

I also get the following error msg on the asterisk CLI
WARNING[16800]: app_voicemail.c:961 retrieve_file: Failed to obtain database object for ‘asterisk’!

what does that mean?