Learning MySQL and MariaDB

Chapter 13. User Accounts and Privileges

We’ve addressed user accounts and privileges a few times up until this point, but in this chapter we’re going to thoroughly discuss this crucial topic. Given the importance of security in any data-related activity, some readers might feel that this topic should have been covered thoroughly at the beginning of the book, and there’s some logic to support that approach. But it’s much more interesting to work with databases first before spending a lot of time on the less exciting administrative tasks such as user privileges and security. Plus, it’s easier to understand the importance of user privileges, and to think about the various ways to set privileges, after you have a firm understanding of tables and other elements of a database. You’re now ready to consider user accounts and related topics, and will have a better appreciation of what’s covered here than you would have if we had explored this subject earlier in the book.

We’ll start by looking at the basics of creating a user account and granting privileges. Then we’ll go through the details of restricting access and granting privileges for various database components. Once you understand these ways to restrict access, we’ll look at what privileges to give some common administrative user accounts. We’ll then look at how to revoke privileges and delete user accounts, as well as how to change passwords and rename user accounts.

User Account Basics

In this book, I have used the term user account ...