How to Install MySQL on Windows 2003

MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system which has over 10 million installations. It runs as a server providing multi-user access to databases. It is by far the most popular and common database used in web applications throughout the world, and almost all hosting companies provide it free of charge to their users. MySQL AB makes MySQL Server available as free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For this tutorial we are going to download and install MySQL on a Windows 2003 server with IIS for a web server. While there are many options in the installation, most of them are outside the scope of this tutorial. Here, our goal is to get MySQL running on your server so you can go on to use it as your database for other web applications.