Learning MySQL

The MySQL Server Daemon

The main MySQL server program, or MySQL server daemon, is called mysqld. Under Windows, there are two main programs you can use: mysqld-nt.exe—which is optimized for Windows XP, 2000, and NT (and probably soon, for Vista)—and mysqld.exe, which can work on older versions of Windows.

On Linux or Mac OS X, the recommended way to start the mysqld program is by calling the mysqld_safe script. This in turn starts mysqld or, if it’s available, mysqld-max—a variant of the MySQL server that includes some more cutting-edge (and less commonly used) features. It also turns on server error logging, which you’d otherwise need to specify as an option to mysqld, and automatically restarts the server if it crashes. Prior to MySQL version 4, this was called safe_mysqld. On a Linux or OS X installation, you will still find a symbolic link called safe_mysqld pointing to mysqld_safe.

MySQL Server Options

The MySQL server is a complex piece of software and has many settings that you can tweak to make it better fit your needs. We’ll discuss some of the more useful server options here. mysqld_safe accepts a number of options of its own and passes on any options it doesn’t handle to mysqld. The options specific to mysqld_safe are probably not of interest to most readers of this book; you can find these by typing mysqld_safe --help at the command line:

basedir

This tells mysqld where MySQL is installed on the system. If you don’t specify this option, the program will try to use the location ...