Learning MySQL

The Contents of the MySQL Directory

A MySQL installation has several key files and directories, and several optional ones. In this section, we’ll briefly cover the contents of the MySQL directory when you’ve downloaded and installed MySQL using a MySQL AB package.

First, there are some text files covering the licensing conditions and the installation process. It’s a good idea to have a quick read through these:

• COPYING

• README

• EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT

• INSTALL-BINARY

The directory also contains the configure script to configure and start a freshly installed server; you shouldn’t need to use this if you’ve followed the instructions in this chapter.

Then there are several subdirectories; the important ones are:

bin/

Contains the executable programs—binaries—such as mysqld_safe and mysqladmin. Compiled programs contain binary (0 and 1) code, rather than human-readable text, hence the name of this directory. However, you’ll probably find some human-readable script files in this directory too.

data/

Contains a subdirectory holding the data and index files for each database on the server. A newly installed and configured MySQL server comes with the mysql and test databases, so you’ll have at least these two subdirectories in your data directory. The mysql database contains information on user access privileges to different databases; as its name suggests, the test database can be used for testing.

docs/

Contains the MySQL manual. Under Linux and Mac OS X, the manual file is in an info file called mysql.info ...