In the MySQL Community team, our charter is to serve the MySQL community — new and old MySQL users alike. One of the ways we do this is by facilitating information exchange between community members, where the new can learn from the old.

And there’s been lots of that information exchange going on, such as over mailing lists (in the early days the dominant vehicle), forums, and Planet MySQL.

One problem with this information exchange has been its ephemeral nature. The same questions pop up for many new users, and should they for some reason not be amongst the issues solved in the MySQL documentation, chances are you’ll have to