I’d had some difficulty manually creating my own windows service for MariaDB (worked fine from the installer), but it was due to the way I was creating it, so I wanted to share the proper approach:

Old Way:

sc create "maria55" binpath= "\"C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/bin/mysqld\"
\"--defaults-file=C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/data/my.ini\""
DisplayName= "Maria55" start= "auto"

New Way:

sc create "maria55" binpath= "\"C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/bin/mysqld\"
\"--defaults-file=C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/data/my.ini\" maria55"
DisplayName= "Maria55" start= "auto"

The key is adding the name, maria55, after the –defaults-file=.. option, but still within the “” that belong to “binpath”.

This extra parameter exists so that mysqld knows whether or not it was started as a service or not.

Without it, the server does not know, and …