“There are 10 types of people in the world — those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

The term “binary” in MySQL has many different meanings. How many can you come up with? I have 6, but I am willing to believe there are more!

0) “Binary distribution” is the name for the package that contains a binary. Another use is “binary installation” but that’s pretty much the same usage pattern as “binary distribution”, so I won’t count “binary installation” as a separate usage.
1) “Server binary” or “client binary” is the actual program (mysqld, mysql).
2) “Binary format” is a compressed format. For example, DECIMAL is stored in a “binary format” — each group of nine digits is compressed into 4 bytes.
3) “Binary log” is the change log. You can argue that this is an extension of #3, because the binary log is a compressed …