CSCI 330 Databases

Overview

Many of the classes offered in the computer science department require specialized technical knowledge. We have noticed a lot of classes come with their own set of technical questions that students have that can only be answered by our office. As many of the resources that are used in classes require maintenance, our office is in charge of bringing these resources up as well as put security restrictions in place. This is our one stop-shop FAQ-esque section for class related technical questions. This is by no means complete.

For information on MySQL Account information, please refer to this page.

Our database class studies the theory of database systems through the practice of using MySQL. In this section of the survival guide, we will walk you through how to access MySQL.

For starters you have to ask yourself how you are going to access MySQL. We require that you access your database through our network for security reasons. So if you plan on accessing it locally (ie, within the departments network, on any lab computer) you can simply run the following line:

mysql -u ${username} -p 

The -u flag indicates the usage of an account username and the -p indicates that a password is associated with your username. If the -p is not specified, mysql will prompt for one.

However if you are planning on working on your databases class anywhere off our network, you need to tunnel through specific port through SSH to access your MySQL database so that when you connect to your database, you are on our network first.

Tunneling MySQL ports through SSH

To connect to the MySQL database, you must connecting from our department network for security reasons. This is easy if you are using the lab machines because your connection is already through our network, but if you are using your own laptop at school or you want to work from home, you will need to Tunnel your traffic from your computer through our network using SSH. SSH Tunneling allows you to securely connect to the department’s network in order to send and receive data regarding the MySQL database server through MySQL’s port (3306) without having to physically use one of the machines on our network.

After tunneling connection through SSH, you will use the localhost address 127.0.0.1 with port 3306 to connect to the database server because your localhost connection is being tunneled to our network.