OSX MySQL Configuration

Caveats: I have used Home brew to install MySQL on Mavericks
Installation:

brew install mysql

Once installed run these steps:

unset TMPDIR
mysql_install_db --verbose --user=`whoami` --basedir="$(brew --prefix mysql)" --datadir=/usr/local/var/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp

Then set up a symlink to the socket used by MySQL:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

This installs MySQL and links it so that the binary

/usr/local/bin/mysql

is a link to

/usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.6.16/bin/mysql

So once set up you may want to configure the environment.
Do this by creating a my.cnf file (or editing the one) in
/usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.6.16/my.cnf

You can then adjust the various options to either match production or to manage the memory used by your local installation.
Here is an example taken straight from http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2013/11/24/reducing-mysqls-memory-usage-on-os-x-mavericks
so they will need to be updated to reflect your needs:

# MySQL overrides
[mysqld]
  max_connections       = 10
  key_buffer_size       = 16K
  max_allowed_packet    = 1M
  table_open_cache      = 4
  sort_buffer_size      = 64K
  read_buffer_size      = 256K
  read_rnd_buffer_size  = 256K
  net_buffer_length     = 2K
  thread_stack          = 128K

Once edited restart mysql:

mysql-server restart

Other tasks:
One things you should do is to set a password for the root user
To do so, start the server, then issue the following commands:

/usr/local/opt/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/local/opt/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h <yourhostname> password 'new-password'

Alternatively you can run:

/usr/local/opt/mysql/bin/mysql_secure_installation

This will run through setting passwords, removing users, test data etc

Some other handy MySQL commands:

# Is MySQL running?

mysqladmin -u root -p ping

For day to day management and interaction with MySQL I use MySQL Workbench