Introduction

MySQL is a powerful open source database management system. MySQL servers are easy to set up and scale quite well. This database system powers some of the world's largest websites including Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

MySQL employs a distributed client-server architecture. A single server can provide database services to multiple client programs simultaneously. Clients running on the same machine as the server usually connect using a Unix socket. Clients can also run on separate machines and connect to the database server over the network. MySQL uses TCP connections, and the server's default listening port is 3306.

Note

Unix domain sockets are channels used for inter-process communication. Different programs running on the same machine can read and write information to a socket, enabling communication between the programs. Unix sockets are represented as nodes of the filesystem, so you can find a socket by listing the contents of a directory in which it was created.

The permissions...