MySQL
Now that you know what a database, table, and column are, the next thing that you would need to do is install a database service where you would be running your SQL queries on.
We would be using MySQL as it is free, open-source, and very widely used.
Installing MySQL
As we are going to use Ubuntu, in order to install MySQL run the following commands:
- First update your
aptrepository:
sudo apt update -y
- Then install MySQL:
sudp apt install mysql-server mysql-client
We are installing 2 packages, one is the actual MySQL server, and the other is the MySQL client, which would allow us to connect to the MySQL server and run our queries.
In order to check if MySQL is running, run the following command:
sudo systemctl status mysql.service
In order to secure your MySQL server, you could run the following command:
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Then follow the prompt and finally choose a secure password and save it in a secure place like a password manager.
With that, you would have MySQL installed on your Ubuntu server. The above should also work just fine on Debina.
Install MySQL on Mac
I would recommend installing MySQL using Homebrew:
brew install mysql
After that start MySQL:
brew services start mysql
And finally, secure it:
mysql_secure_installation
In case that you ever need to stop the MySQL service, you could do so with the following command:
brew services stop mysql
Install MySQL on Windows
In order to install MySQL on Windows, I would recommend following the steps from the official documentation here:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/windows-installation.html
Accessing MySQL via CLI
To access MySQL run the mysql command followed by your user:
mysql -u root -p
Creating a database
After that, switch to the demo database that we created in the previous chapter:
USE demo;
To exit the just type the following:
exit;
Configuring .my.cnf
By configuring the ~/.my.cnf file in your user's home directory, MySQL would allow you to login without prompting you for a password.
In order to make that change, what you need to do is first create a .my.cnf file in your user's home directory:
touch ~/.my.cnf
After that, set secure permissions so that other regular users could not read the file:
chmod 600 ~/.my.cnf
Then using your favorite text editor, open the file:
nano ~/.my.cnf
And add the following configuration:
[client]
user=YOUR_MYSQL_USERNAME
password=YOUR_MYSQL_PASSWORD
Make sure to update your MySQL credentials accordingly, then save the file and exit.
After that, if you run just mysql, you will be authenticated directly with the credentials that you've specified in the ~/.my.cnf file without being prompted for a password.
The mysqladmin command
As a quick test, you could check all of your open SQL connections by running the following command:
mysqladmin proc
The mysqladmin tool would also use the client details from the ~/.my.cnf file, and it would list your current MySQL process list.
Another cool thing that you could try doing is combining this with the watch command and kind of monitor your MySQL connections in almost real-time:
watch -n1 mysqladmin proc
To stop the watch command, just hit CTRL+C
GUI clients
If you prefer using GUI clients, you could take a look a the following ones and install them locally on your laptop:
This will allow you to connect to your database via a graphical interface rather than the mysql command-line tool.