Summary

Today's lesson covered a lot of ground in the diverse topic of administration. Some parts were elementary and showed you commands that you'll use often, whereas other parts were more advanced.

You studied the all-important mysqladmin command in detail. It enables you to do just about anything, from creating a database to studying the performance of your MySQL server.

You looked at the use of my.cnf and my.ini, the primary way of setting MySQL's server variables.

You also were introduced to a range of the other utilities included with MySQL. These perform a variety of tasks, including displaying logs, importing, and dumping data. Many of these are covered in more detail in other lessons.

Also covered today were the mysqldump and mysqlhotcopy utilities for making backups of databases, either for safe-keeping or relocation.

Finally, you looked at the structure of the MySQL data directory. You should now be able to look at your own server's directory and pick out the various kinds of logs, as well as the files containing table definitions, data, and indexes.