MySQL Root Account

[James McDonald]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 09:52:39PM -0500, Kurt Wall wrote:
> I'm looking for opinions, which I know most of people on this list have. 
> By default, the MySQL administrative account (the one with superuser 
> privileges in MySQL), is named "root." This seems like a really 
> unfortunate choice of names, in that the system superuser account is 
> likewise named "root." I'm thinking of changing it to something more 
> reasonable, like "dba" or "admin." It seems like a good idea to me, but 
> I'm open to other opinions.

Isn't the reason for this so that the default mysql login name is pulled from the USER env var?

I have frequently got confused by the fact that you have two roots on a system with possibly wildly differnt passwords or worse yet the same password.

Most of the time I try not to change softwares default behaviour because chaning it makes you do that little bit more configuration the next time it's installed. Except when it's security related which this is. The only real worry is when someone makes an assumption and hard codes the root user into their apps.