Learning MySQL

Chapter 9. Managing Users and Privileges

Learning MySQL, developing applications, and deploying finished software are tasks with very different security requirements. While you’re learning the basics—especially if you’re working on your own machine—it’s not usually critical if you accidentally remove databases or tables, change data, or don’t carefully limit access to the MySQL server and its databases. However, when you develop and maintain real applications, it’s crucial that you secure your server and databases against accidental or deliberate acts that can delete, change, or expose your data. Fortunately, using MySQL’s sophisticated user and privilege management tools, you can properly set up and secure access to your database server. This chapter shows you how.

In addition to setting up the MySQL server access privileges, you should separately ensure the physical security of your host computer and backup media, and proper configuration of permissions at the operating system level. We’ve explained some important aspects of this in Chapters 2 and 10, and we’ll also look at this topic briefly in this chapter.

The MySQL server comes with the user root, who can do everything on the MySQL server, including creating and deleting users, databases, tables, indexes, and data. Up to this point, we’ve connected to the server under this superuser account, which is very convenient, but not very secure—remember the saying about how absolute power corrupts absolutely?

Most applications don’t ...