The only things you really need to run these utilities on a Windows machine are a spreadsheet program (I have only tested in Excel, but will most likely work with alternatives) and a
MySQL database server.
This server should live on your local machine because the application will be creating and deleting databases, and you will also need to set a global variable on the server - things that are hard to do on remote servers.
The two easiest ways to get MySQL server on your Windows machine are either downloading it directly from Oracle or installing an application called MAMP. I have found that the Oracle distribution is a little confusing to get set up, while MAMP is straight-forward and simple. However, MAMP will also install a web-server on your machine. Not harmful, but totally unnecessary for our purposes.
Once you have MySQL installed, you will need login credentials. These consist of a host name, username, and password. If you installed using the Oracle distribution, the default credentials are:
host = 127.0.0.1
user = root
password = [something you define at setup]
With MAMP, they default to:
host = localhost
user = root
password = root
The other thing you'll need to do is set a global variable. OOTP data files are very big, and we need to configure the server to accept large amounts of data at once. We're going to change the
variable. We do this by finding the my.ini file.
Find and Edit the my.ini File:
1. Start MySQL server
2. Hit Win-R (or search windows) and type 'services'.
3. Find MySQL in the list, Right Click on it and choose Properties
4. Find the Path to Executable (it should be something like: "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\bin\mysqld.exe")
5. Go to that location. If there is a file called my.ini or my.cnf there, then open it for editing. Otherwise, create a new text file called my.ini
6. Find or create a section of the document [mysqld]
7. In that section, enter the following text:
Code:
max_allowed_packet=999M
8. Save and close the document
9. Restart the server
Bit of a hassle, but the good news is you only have to do it once.