ColdFusion 11 – MySQL no Suitable Driver

For reasons too complicated to get into, ColdFusion 11 no longer ships with a JDBC driver for MySQL. This is a change over previous versions of ColdFusion. Largely, this is because of a license issue relating to redistributing the Jar file.

How to fix it

The fix is easy:

1. download the JDBC driver JDBC Driver for MySQL (Connector/J) here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/.
2. in the Platform select box, choose platform independent
3. next, choose the tar or zip version appropriate for your platform. If you don’t know which to pick, choose the zip version.
4. next, on the screen titled “Begin Your Download – mysql-connector-java-5.1.35.zip”, scroll to the bottom and choose the small link “No thanks, just start my download.”
5. finally, once the download completes, extract “mysql-connector-java-5.1.35-bin.jar” and put it in the lib directory of your CF install. For me it is located at: C:\ColdFusion11\cfusion\lib (your platform and coldfusion edition impacts the path for you.
6. restart ColdFusion and validate your datasource in the ColdFusion Administrator.

That’s all there is too it!