A Free Windows Graphical Interface to MySQL

By Stephen Bucaro

MySQL is a powerful relational database management system used by many major organizations such as Yahoo, NASA and the U.S. Census Bureau. The best thing about MySQL is that it is open source software available free of charge for non-commercial use under the open source GNU public License.

In my previous article "Gettting Started With MySQL Database" we installed MySQL on Windows and worked with it using MySQL monitor in a DOS window. While you can perform most database tasks with MySQL monitor, it gets pretty tedious working in a DOS window.

Rather than work with a DOS window, you will want to download MySQLGUI from www.mysql.com. MySQLGUI is a graphical interface to MySQL that can do the same things as MySQL monitor. Versions of MySQLGUI are available for Windows and Linux.

For Windows, you'll need to extract the zip file. I recommend extracting it to a new subfolder of the mysql folder. Before opening MySQLGUI, make sure the mysql database server is running. To start MySQL server open a MS-DOS prompt and type the following line.

C:\mysql\bin\mysqld-max

Then double-click on the file mysqlgui.exe. When you first start MySQLGUI you are prompted for a password. Enter the password for the root user ("mysql" if you haven't changed it), and then click on the Options button.

In the "MySQLGUI client options" dialog box, click on the server tab and specify the host name for MySQL server (localhost if on the same machine). Also enter the name of a default database. In the previous article we created a database named firstdb.