A clean slate for MySQL

Somehow, my local MySQL instance got into a state where the root user didn’t have permissions to modify or create databases. Users and their privileges on the system are stored in tables in the mysql database, so it should be possible to modify the table entries to grant permissions. However, because the root user didn’t have permission to do this, I couldn’t make it so.

I tried several variations of restarting the database service without the permissions, but either I followed the instructions wrongly, or it simply didn’t work as suggested. Eventually I found this article on clearing out all traces of MySQL on an OSX system. Fortunately, I only had one project with any notable amount of data, and I had backups of that data.