First and foremost I am just a hacker and not really a developer, so this process may work for you but then again it may not!!!
First download the bundled Liferay-Tomcat version from http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/downloads. Simply put, unzip the file, navigate to the bin directory and execute startup.bat. There are instructions for installing this version on the Liferay web site.
Liferay is database agnostic, therefore it shouldn't really care what database you are using.
1. Copy the mysql driver jar file to %/catalina%/common/lib
2. Edit ROOT.xml in %catalina%/conf/catalina/localhost/