Running MySQL on Windows

MySQL supports TCP/IP on all Windows platforms and named pipes on NT. The default
is to use named pipes for local connections on NT and TCP/IP for all other cases if the
client has TCP/IP installed. The host name speci es which protocol is used:
Host name Protocol
NULL (none) On NT, try named pipes rst; if that doesn't work, use
TCP/IP. On Win95/Win98, TCP/IP is used.
. Named pipes
localhost TCP/IP to current host
hostname TCP/IP
You can force a MySQL client to use named pipes by specifying the --pipe option or by
specifying . as the host name. Use the --socket option to specify the name of the pipe.

You can test whether or not MySQL is working by executing the following commands:

C:\mysql\bin\mysqlshow
C:\mysql\bin\mysqlshow -u root mysql
C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin version status proc
C:\mysql\bin\mysql test
If mysqld is slow to answer to connections on Win95/Win98, there is probably a problem with your DNS. In this case, start mysqld with --skip-name-resolve and use only
localhost and IP numbers in the MySQL grant tables. You can also avoid DNS when
connecting to a mysqld-nt MySQL server running on NT by using the --pipe argument
to specify use of named pipes. This works for most MySQL clients.
There are two versions of the MySQL command-line tool:
mysql Compiled on native Windows, which o ers very limited text editing capabilities.
mysqlc Compiled with the Cygnus GNU compiler and libraries, which
o ers readline editing.
If you want to use mysqlc.exe, you must copy `C:\mysql\lib\cygwinb19.dll' to
`\windows\system' (or similar place).
The default privileges on Windows give all local users full privileges to all databases. To
make MySQL more secure, you should set a password for all users and remove the row in
the mysql.user table that has Host='localhost' and User=''.
You should also add a password for the root user. (The following example starts by
removing the anonymous user, that allows anyone to access the 'test' database.):
C:\mysql\bin\mysql mysql

mysql> DELETE FROM user WHERE Host='localhost' AND User='';
mysql> QUIT
C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin reload
C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root password your_password