The database user should only be granted SELECT permissions on the specified database & tables you want to query.
Grafana does not validate that queries are safe so queries can contain any SQL statement. For example, statements
like <code>USE otherdb;</code> and <code>DROP TABLE user;</code> would be executed. To protect against this we
<strong>Highly</strong> recommmend you create a specific MySQL user with restricted permissions.
Checkout the <aclass="external-link"target="_blank"href="http://docs.grafana.org/features/datasources/mysql/">MySQL Data Source Docs</a> for more information.