I've been doing quite a bit of work with MariaDB, a drop-in replacement for MySQL (forked from the MySQL codebase by Monty Widenius, the creator of MySQL). One issue I ran into is that the current Windows installer does not create the Windows service that you generally would want to use. And because I had to (yet again) dig around today for the solution, I am posting it here for the next time I need it.
At a command prompt, go to the bin folder under the MariaDB installation folder, and then run:
mysqld --install
You should see a message telling you that the service (named MySQL by default) was created.
--- Ben