Here are the links for the Windows 32-bit installers.The version we’re interested in is the free-as-in-both-speech-and-beer Community Edition, which is available at the MySQL site. Whether you just need PHP and MySQL so that you can experiment with WordPress template designs or are the “I build on Windows, but deploy on Linux” type or are developing for a server setup where IIS is serving both ASP.NET and PHP apps (and yes, IIS does that!), you’re going to want MySQL on your dev box. Hence this article, where I walk through the steps of installing MySQL Server 5.1 on Windows for a developer machine.
You’ll be told that you need to install MySQL, but it leaves installing it up to you. One necessary thing that the Web Platform Installer doesn’t do for you – and I assume it’s because of licensing restrictions of one kind or another – is install MySQL, which many PHP apps, including a number that the Web Platform Installer installs, use.
(While the old way of installing PHP on Windows wasn’t rocket science, it involved enough steps and configuration changes to justify my writing a whole article on the topic in an old developer blog of mine.) It makes installing these goodies a simple of matter of checking the items you want and clicking the Install button. You’ve probably heard of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, a free-as-in-beer tool that makes it a snap to install a variety of Microsoft and Open Source web applications and development tools, ranging from “The Usual Suspects”, such as Visual Web Developer, IIS and SQL Server 2008 Express to stuff you might not expect, such as PHP and WordPress.