“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 …