External databases
The standard MyTunesRSS configuration uses an embedded database for storing information. It creates tables with all tracks, albums, artists, genres and playlists when creating or updating the database. All this is done automatically and you need not care about it.
If you have a rather large library, say about 10.000 tracks or more, this simple embedded database gets a little slow. The larger your library, the slower the database. In this case you can setup an external database. MyTunesRSS currently supports MySql and Postgres as a database system. There are specific chapters on both of the databases with some hints on setup. External databases, no matter which one you choose, are much faster and more reliable.
For using an external database you have to create a user for the database and tell MyTunesRSS a few details about it in the database configuration.
Setting up a MySql database
This short tutorial will provide detailed step-by-step instructions for getting a MySql database running with MyTunesRSS. It will not cover installing and starting the MySql server itself. It assumes you already have MySql installed and running. First you connect to MySql with the MySql command line tool. The default installation has a user "root" with no password set.
mysql -u root
Now create a database called "mytunesrss" and a user called "mytunesrss" with the password "secret" and grant all permission on the new database to that user. Please also have a look at the official mysql documentation for more information on authentication since you might run into problems depending on the users in your database and the hosts from which you connect to the database.
create database mytunesrss character set utf8; create user mytunesrss identified by 'secret'; grant all privileges on mytunesrss.* to mytunesrss;
That is all you need on the MySql side. Now you can exit the command line tool and continue configuring MyTunesRSS. The tables are created by MyTunesRSS on the first start.
exit
First you need the mysql JDBC driver which you can download from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/5.0.html (the location might change without notice). The archive contains several files but all you need is a file called mysql-connector-java-5.0.7-bin.jar or similar. The version number for example might be different, e.g. "5.0.8". Copy this file into the additional libraries folder of MyTunesRSS. This is a folder called lib in the MyTunesRSS preferences folder (see here for the location).
For the above example you have to set the database type to mysql, the driver to com.mysql.jdbc.Driver, the connection to jdbc:mysql://localhost/mytunesrss, the user to mytunesrss and the password to secret. You may have to change the "localhost" in the connection to the server name of your MySql database if it is not running on the same computer that is running MyTunesRSS.