Why not simply install a mysql server on your machine? On Debian it's a aptitude install mysql-server-5.0 away, and I guess other systems don't make it more complicated (on windows you'll probably have to find the installer binary yourself).

Then you need a bit of configuration, but it's really not much, and then you can use the same DBD module on your local machine as on the production site. Which can be very important if things like UTF-8 handling are different than in other drivers.