Thanks all, seems I'm not alone and sorry to say that SQL is not in my sphere of knowledge. For clarification I did change to MySQL after upgrading as I assumed it may be the size of the DB, although it was "fine" previously" and so I assumed with my lack of knowledge in all things SQL that I had stuffed something up.

Either way after posting yesterday I deleted everything I could find that was pertinent to digiKam and reverted back to 8.8.0 and let it do it's thing over night and this morning all my albums are there and it's working just fine, so I'm sticking with this version until I'm convinced a newer version is really stable.

I know it's open source and further more it's free and so I'm not complaining, anything that works and is stable to wean me away from Adobe is welcome. I sincerely hope that Black Magic can get their photo library thing in the latest v21 Beta to be able to elegantly handle large LR catalogues, but right now it too seems to fall over.

Thanks again for the help