Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Finding the Software
You can obtain acopy of MySQL from
MySQL's site
, which requires an Oracle login but is
still free, or from one of its
mirror sites
. You can instead download MariaDB, which con-
tains the latest release of MySQL and some additional features. You can get a copy of
MariaDB from
the MariaDB Foundation site
, which is also free and requires registration.
When downloading the software on both sites, you'll have to provide some information
about yourself, your organization, and how you intend to use the software. They're collect-
ing information to understand how the software is used and to give to their sales depart-
ment. But if you indicate that you don't want to be contacted, you can just download the
software and not have to interact further with them.
If your server or local computer has MySQL or MariaDB installed on it, you can skip this
chapter. If you're not sure whether MySQL or MariaDB is running on the computer you're
using, you could enter something like this from the command line of a Linux or Mac ma-
chine:
ps aux | grep mysql
If MySQL is running, the preceding command should produce results like the following:
2763 ? 00:00:00 mysqld_safe
2900 ? 5-23:48:51 mysqld
On a Windows computer, you can usethe
tasklist
tool to see whether MySQL is running.
Enter something like the following from the command line:
tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq mysqld"
If it's running, you will get results like this:
Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage
============== ======= ============== ========= ==========
mysqld.exe 1356 Services 0 212 K
If it's not running, you may get results like this from tasklist:
INFO: No tasks are running which match the specified criteria.
This isn't conclusive proof that you don't have MySQL installed. It just shows that the dae-
mon isn't running. You might try searching your computer for
mysqld
, using a file manager
or some other such program. You might also tryrunning
mysqladmin
, assuming it's in-
stalled on your server, and use the first line shown here to test MySQL (an example of the
results you should see follow):
