If your compiling a product that includes a dependency of MySQL, you can easily get the error
configure: error: mysql_config executable not found
I generally don’t see this problem, because I use MySQL binary tar files, however if you use MySQL packages, such as Ubuntu, you can easily miss the required dependency.
My currently installed MySQL packages on this Ubuntu machine are:
$ sudo dpkg -l | grep mysql ii libdbd-mysql 0.8.2-1-4.1 MySQL database server driver for libdbi ii libdbd-mysql-perl 4.008-1 A Perl5 database interface to the MySQL data ii libmysqlclient15off 5.1.30really5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2 MySQL database client library ii libmysqlclient16 5.1.31-1ubuntu2 MySQL database client library ii libqt4-sql-mysql 4.5.0-0ubuntu4.1 Qt 4 MySQL database driver ii mysql-client-5.1 5.1.31-1ubuntu2 MySQL database client binaries ii mysql-common 5.1.30really5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2 MySQL database common files ii mysql-server-5.1 5.1.31-1ubuntu2 MySQL database server binaries ii php5-mysql 5.2.6.dfsg.1-3ubuntu4.1 MySQL module for php5
The missing link is the development version of the libmysqlclient library.
sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev