Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Figure 22-7. The MySQL pane in System Preferences
By default, MySQL sets up a root user with full access and no password. In other words,
until you do something about it, your MySQL installation is completely unsecured. The first
thing to do after starting the server is to lock down that root account. The easiest way to do this
is with the MySQL command-line admin tool:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password "newpwd"
where newpwd is your new password.
NOTE Aside from the root user, there are also two anonymous accounts with unsecured root
access. However, these accounts can only access databases whose names start with test_, and
only from the localhost, so they are not much of a risk. Still, if you are actually planning on
serving pages professionally, you should lock or remove these accounts. See the online MySQL
manual for more details.
Once it’s installed, the default MySQL client program can be invoked from the command
line, like so:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p
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The -p flag will cause MySQL to prompt you for your password. Once you enter it, the
command-line client program will launch. Type help to get a list of available commands, and
type quit to exit.
MySQL also makes a set of graphical administrative tools that can be downloaded and
installed separately, as shown in Figure 22-8. The graphical package contains a manager, a query
tool, and a Dashboard widget for monitoring the health of your database. If you love commandline
database management, more power to you. For the rest of us, the GUI is a really nice
addition.
TIP To connect to your local machine’s MySQL server in the graphical administrator, use the
host name localhost.