You will need to register for access to the database service before you can connect.
Windows users may wish to use a graphical tool to interact with your database. There are many such tools available, however HeidiSQL provides a stable interface and includes the ability to take database dumps.
To connect to the service you will need a MySQL or MariaDB client. We are currently running version 5.5 of MariaDB and as such any 5.5 or greater client should connect without trouble.
When connecting to the database from campus, you should connect to bb2db.bham.ac.uk on port 3306. From the BlueBEAR cluster, simply connect to bb2db on port 3306. Using this name will connect to the high availability cluster providing fault-tolerant access to the database servers.
If you are experienced and are writing your own application, you may wish to do your own HA connections, you can connect to bb2db01.bham.ac.uk and bb2db02.bham.ac.uk, both on port 3306. For most users, we suggest you do notdo this.
Important note:It is only possible to connect to the database servers from the BlueBEAR cluster and from the University campus network. Connections to the database service from off-site are not permittedand will be discarded by the firewall, this helps to protect the integrity of the service and reduce the likelihood of an attack being made on the service and hence reduce the possibility of data loss.