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Wednesday Aug 20, 2008

Sakila Sample Database Available

Hi all,

I got some great news last night. David Van Couvering announced that the Sakila sample database was available on the Update Center. For those of you unfamiliar with Sakila, it is a very big sample database with a lot of data. It's a great database for fully testing features of MySQL. Sakila has actually been around for awhile now, but the size of the database had made it unusable in NetBeans IDE. Now, David has created a plugin that makes it very easy for you to load the MySQL Sakila sample database from NetBeans.

Here's how you can try it out:

Get a development build of NetBeans 6.5. (It will not work with 6.5 Beta.)
Get the plugin in the Plugin Manager (Tools > Plugins) To filter the plugins, type Sakila in the search box. Then install the plugin.
Now make sure that you have MySQL on your machine and that it is running. Then, in the Services window, expand Databases > right-click the MySQL Server node and choose Connect. (If you don't have this node, right-click Databases and choose Register MySQL Server.
Right-click the MySQl Server node and choose Create Database. In the Create MySQL Database dialog box, select the Saklia database (It was added by the plugin). Click OK.
In the New Database Connection dialog box, type the user and password and click OK.
When prompted for a schema, just click OK. Expand the sakila database connection > Tables in the Services windows and stare in amazement at all the goodies you've just installed.
After finishing celebrating, you can starting using the data. Wow. Life just got a little bit better.