Learning MySQL

Understanding and Changing Passwords

This section explains how user passwords work in MySQL and how they can be set, changed, and removed. Passwords can be of any length, though practical limitations in some operating systems necessitate that they be no longer than eight characters. When assigning passwords, we recommend that you follow the same principles that you would with any other password-protected system: choose passwords that have a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numeric, and special characters; avoid using dictionary words; and avoid recording your password anywhere it can be easily found. We use no passwords and simple passwords—such as the_password—in this chapter to demonstrate concepts, but we recommend that in practice you use a more complex password that incorporates a mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols (for example, 1n1T?s313Y0). Of course, choose a password that you can remember without having to write it down somewhere; pieces of paper often turn up in the wrong hands!

The simplest method to set a password is to use the IDENTIFIED BY clause when you create or modify the privileges of a user. You’ve seen several examples of this so far in this chapter. Here’s one reproduced from a previous section:

mysql> GRANT ALL ON music.* TO 'allmusic'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'the_password';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.06 sec)

This process takes the plain-text string the_password, hashes it using the MySQL PASSWORD() function, and stores the hashed string in the ...