Start the mysql command line client by running: $ mysql -u root -p Enter the mysql root user's password when prompted. To configure the MySQL database, create the nova database. mysql> CREATE DATABASE nova; Create a MySQL user and password for the newly-created nova database that has full control of the database. mysql> GRANT ALL ON nova.* TO 'nova'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '[YOUR_NOVADB_PASSWORD]'; mysql> GRANT ALL ON nova.* TO 'nova'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '[YOUR_NOVADB_PASSWORD]'; In the above commands, even though the 'nova'@'%' also matches 'nova'@'localhost', you must explicitly specify the 'nova'@'localhost' entry. By default, MySQL will create entries in the user table with User='' and Host='localhost'. The User='' acts as a wildcard, matching all users. If you do not have the 'nova'@'localhost' account, and you try to log in as the nova user, the precedence rules of MySQL will match against the User='' Host='localhost' account before it matches against the User='nova' Host='%' account. This will result in an error message that looks like: ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'nova'@'localhost' (using password: YES) Thus, we create a separate User='nova' Host='localhost' entry that will match with higher precedence. See the MySQL documentation on connection verification for more details on how MySQL determines which row in the user table it uses when authenticating connections. Enter quit at the mysql> prompt to exit MySQL. mysql> quit The command to populate the database is described later in the documentation, in the Section entitled Configuring the Database for Compute. Additional steps are required to configure MySQL for production mode. In particular, anonymous accounts should be removed. On several distributions, these accounts can be removed by running the following script after installing mysql: /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation