MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Windows Distributions

Installing MySQL on a server using Windows is fairly easy. If MySQL is already installed and running on your server and you want to install a newer version, you will need to shut down the existing one first. For server versions of MS Windows (e.g., Windows NT), MySQL is installed as a service. If it’s installed as a service on your server, you can enter the following from a DOS command window to shut down the service and remove it:

mysqld -remove

If MySQL is running, but not as a service, you can enter the following from a DOS command window to shut it down:

msyqladmin -u root shutdown

MySQL AB’s site (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/) contains three installation packages: a Windows Essential package, a standard Windows package, and a standard Windows package without the installer. The Windows Essential package is the recommended format. It contains only the essential files for running MySQL. This includes the usual command-line utilities and the header files for the C API. The standard Windows package contains the essential files, as well as documentation, the MySQL Administrator, the embedded server, the benchmark suite, and a few other useful scripts. The standard Windows package without the installer contains the same binary files and other related files for MySQL, but not an installer. You’ll need to extract and copy the files into the c:\mysql directory. Then, you must create a my.ini file in the c:\windows directory. Several examples showing different server ...