Comments - Troubleshooting Connection Issues
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Installing MariaDB (a.k.a. MySQL) for the first time on my desktop PC, I experienced a number of issues and followed quite a few false leads in attempting to solve them before finding that I needed to follow a few simple steps at installation time. To experts they may seem obvious, but the following may assist newbies like myself.
(1) Download and install both the mysql (or mariadb) package (the client) AND the mariadb-server package (the server)! In retrospect this seems obvious, but in my case the client and server run on the same machine, and I naively assumed that the mariadb package contained everything I needed to get up and running. Of course it doesn't, and invoking mysql produced an error message saying that the required connection socket did not exist.
(2) After installing the server, it needs to be started, otherwise you get the same socket error. For example on my Fedora Linux system:
sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
(3) Running MySQL as an ordinary user, it now starts, but returns a "Permission denied error", because users need to be GRANTed permission to access the databases. This is fixed by running MySQL as root and using the GRANT command, eg.:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* to 'alexander'@'localhost';
I hope this is a help to somebody.