General:
--------

Pro:

* The most widely-used RDBMS in Python, so lots of developer support.
* One of the easiest SQL languages to understand.
* Can do date calculations and pattern searches at the C level (faster than doing it in Python).  This also applies to most other RDBMSs.
* Many books and `MySQL third party tools`_ are available. -- ChuckEsterbrook_ - 31 Dec 2001
* High availability among web host providers. -- ChuckEsterbrook_ - 31 Dec 2001
* It's OpenSource. -- ChuckEsterbrook_ - 31 Dec 2001

Con:

* MySQL was designed for write occasionally, read quickly, rather than for intense write-frequently situations.
* Transactions were added recently and are available only with a non-default data storage type.
* MySQL is easier to crash under high load than PostgreSQL or Oracle.

-- MikeOrr_ - 31 Dec 2001


Configuration Tips:
-------------------

Switching to UTF-8
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nowadays it is best to use UTF-8 encoded strings throughout your application.
Here is how you can configure MySQL to work with UTF-8, if you were using latin-1 before.

Adapt your configuration in /etc/mysql/my.cnf::

  [mysqld]
  character-set-server=utf8
  collation-server=utf8_general_ci
  default-character-set=utf8
  skip-character-set-client-handshake

Using mysql oder phpmyadmin::

  SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%' 

This should look like::

  character_set_client        utf8
  character_set_connection    utf8
  character_set_database      latin1
  character_set_filesystem    binary
  character_set_results       utf8
  character_set_server        utf8
  character_set_system        utf8
  character_sets_dir          /usr/share/mysql/charsets/

Restart the server::
  
  /etc/init.d/mysql restart

If you already have data stored, change the encoding in the database dump
from ``varchar(n)`` to ``varchar(n) collate utf8_unicode_ci`` and change
the ``DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1`` to ``DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci``.

See also:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html
(note the post by Yuri Tsarev) and
http://tahpot.blogspot.com/2005/06/mysql-and-python-and-unicode.html

-- Tobias - 14 Apr 2010