Here's a really quick tip for anyone using Rails on Cygwin. If you want to connect to a MySQL database the understood practice is to compile MySQL and go through the hassle of getting it all working within Cygwin itself. After what I've gone through with it all, the best way of getting this combination to work is to:

• Install MySQL under Windows itself rather than Cygwin.
• Make sure that the MySQL binaries are in your system path under Windows and, if installing via SSH, restart the Cygwin SSH service so that your login will be able to see the new path.
• When installing the MySQL gem (gem install mysql) select the mswin32 option rather than the pure Ruby option.
• Now, when you define your database connections just give the machine's IP address instead of saying "localhost" and it'll work great!

After wasting several days getting it all to work the "proper" way, the above is a much cleaner solution.