I've been running a local MySQL server for development purposes lately and for some reason never got around to running it as a service so I was constantly starting it up using the mysqld.exe every time I started doing any database work.
I've finally decided that this should be running as a service because I'm using it pretty much every day now. I easily set it up as a service and everything appeared to be working but as soon as I tried to connect to it (via Workbench) I was unexpectedly presented with a password prompt.
I've just been using the default "root" user without a password because I have no security concerns about the database or access to my box previously but now I can't access my MySQL instance using those credentials.
Stopping the service and running the mysqld.exe allows me to connect just fine with my previous credentials. What am I doing wrong here? Is the MySQL service not just running mysqld.exe on start up?
I'm running Windows 7 on this box if it makes any difference.
"C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\bin\mysqld" --defaults-file="C:\ProgramData\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\my.ini" MySQL56
which is exactly how I've been starting MySQL manually.