Existing users are listed in the lower left area of the sidebar. If there are many user accounts on your MySQL server, the field with the magnifying glass icon may be handy for filtering the users you are looking for. Typing in t or T, for example, will set the filter to users whose names begin with a t. The filter works in a case-insensitive fashion.

If you are an experienced MySQL user, you will notice that users are not listed in the typical MySQL way (user@host ), but rather with their user names only. If double clicking on a user name does not show subcategories for that user, this means that the user's privileges are not restricted to a specific host, or hosts. If there are subcategories, the user's privileges are restricted to a specific host, or set of hosts. You may assign various (and different) sets of privileges, depending on the host from which the user connects to the MySQL server. That concept is described in detail in Access Control, Stage 1: Connection Verification.

Note that MySQL Administrator has a different concept of what a user is than MySQL has. In MySQL, a user is always identified by a username/host combination. This means that, for example, 'brian'@'%' may be a user completely different from 'brian'@'localhost'. The former might be Brian Miller, while the latter might be Brian Schultz. That distinction does not hold true for MySQL Administrator: User brian is always a particular user, no matter from which host he connects to the MySQL server. That said, 'brian'@'%' may still have privileges different from 'brian'@'localhost'.

Figure 13.1. User Accounts

For example, you might have a user called superuser. If double clicking on that user name shows two subcategories, localhost and athena, this means that the user has a specific set of privileges if he/she connects from localhost, and a (probably different) set of privileges if he/she connects from athena.

Right clicking on a user name, or on one of the subcategories a user might have, provides access to the following commands: