The easiest method of installation is to use the binary distribution of the Connector/J package. The binary distribution is available either as a Tar/Gzip or Zip file which you must extract to a suitable location and then optionally make the information about the package available by changing your CLASSPATH (see Section 20.4.2.2, “Installing the Driver and Configuring the CLASSPATH”).

MySQL Connector/J is distributed as a .zip or .tar.gz archive containing the sources, the class files, and the JAR archive named mysql-connector-java-[version]-bin.jar, and starting with Connector/J 3.1.8 a debug build of the driver in a file named mysql-connector-java-[version]-bin-g.jar.

Starting with Connector/J 3.1.9, the .class files that constitute the JAR files are only included as part of the driver JAR file.

You should not use the debug build of the driver unless instructed to do so when reporting a problem or a bug, as it is not designed to be run in production environments, and will have adverse performance impact when used. The debug binary also depends on the Aspect/J runtime library, which is located in the src/lib/aspectjrt.jar file that comes with the Connector/J distribution.

You will need to use the appropriate graphical or command-line utility to extract the distribution (for example, WinZip for the .zip archive, and tar for the .tar.gz archive). Because there are potentially long file names in the distribution, we use the GNU tar archive format. You will need to use GNU tar (or an application that understands the GNU tar archive format) to unpack the .tar.gz variant of the distribution.