aka “How to use multiple MySQL Servers and Workbench in Snow Leopard without using Terminal… and live happily ever after”

The MySQL Community is a world of command-line aficionados. Many people, including myself, show their love to the simple-but-powerful interface of the mysql command-line client, but not everybody is keen to use a bash shell and give up its GUI, no matter how powerful the software is.

Until recently, GUI tools for MySQL were half baked solutions: in the end, there was always something that you had to do via the command line. Today, you can install, set up and use MySQL on your Mac with Snow Leopard without using Terminal, at all.

My Special Needs

Before digging into the details of the installation, let me describe what I need on my Mac. I use various versions of MySQL and I often need to run 2 or more instances at the same time. I constantly build, install and uninstall versions of …

Just when I was showing off how easy is it to install a MySQL sandbox from a tarball, I was faced by an unexpected error. The tar application was not among the recognized ones. As soon as I saw the error, I immediately knew what had …

As all you Mac users (and probably many non-Macies) know Apple released Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) recently, even though this release was announced for September previously. Since a large part of the MySQL Workbench user base works on OS X it was clear that many of you will test Workbench on the new OS. However, so far we haven’t had the opportunity to do the same (too busy fixing bugs on released OSes) and hence we did not know about incompatibility problems there.

In the meantime several users did tests and reported us a crash on startup of the application, which means you cannot use MySQL Workbench on Snow Leopard for the time being. We are currently preparing build, test and developer machines with it and will hand out a fixed WB release as soon as possible. So, please stay patient. It’s only a matter of days.

The next release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, will have ZFS enabled by default. There’s a good article for the masses, at ZDNet on ZFS on Snow Leopard - do read it.

We all know running any form of server using HFS+ tends to be a bit of a joke. So, Snow Leopard Server will be where ZFS makes its debut. It won’t be long before regular users will want it in their Mac Pro’s and so on…

OS X as a deployment platform for production MySQL servers? This is not far off, I’m sure.