MySQL JDBC Connector on Mac OSX

If you're working on any Java based program which uses MySQL as it's back-end database, you might find this article extremely helpful.

In order to pull data from the MySQL database, it is first important to establish a connection with it so that the script can talk with it.

The connection can be established by using the MySQL JDBC driver. Now, this driver needs to be separately downloaded. Here's the download link btw. If you're working on Mac OSX, please select the platform-independent version of the Connector from the drop down.

Once downloaded, untar the tar (or unzip the zip file). Copy the mysql-connector-x.x-bin.jar to /Library/Java/Extensions.

If you're using Eclipse IDE for editing class files, you need to make some changes in Eclipse's preferences. So go to Eclipse -> Preferences -> Java -> User Libraries. Click 'New' to create a new user library named as "MYSQL_CONNECTOR_LIBRARY" for instance. Now, click "Add External JARs..." button and browse to the downloaded jar : mysql-connector-x.x-bin.jar.

So if you're Java application is trying to connect to MySQL database, the following code snippet might come in handy for quick reference.

import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.SQLException;

try {

connection=DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306", "username", "password");

}