Hi Peter,
ODBC is only one way to connect to a db server. It's kind of a generalization for such connections which is broadly usable but with the some speed cost. So it's only used by applications that want to reach a large number of different RDBMS types. Also MySQL has an ODBC connector that you can use e.g. from within Excel.
However, MySQL Workbench knows how to talk nativly to the MySQL server, so it doesn't need ODBC and it also doesn't support ODBC. All you have to do instead is to specify the address of your MySQL server, its port and the user/pw combination to access it. On Windows there's an automatic detection if your MySQL server runs as a service and no connection is defined yet in MySQL Workbench. In this scenario WB will scan all services which contain the string "mysql" (not case sensitive) in the name and will add a connection for each.
You can of course simply trigger the New Connection Wizard from the home screen and let it figure out most of your settings (if the server is local).
Mike
Mike Lischke, MySQL Developer Tools
Oracle Corporation
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