I just learned about the ‘SHOW CHARACTER SET’ statement; it lists all of the available character sets and their default collations on a particular mySQL server. Handy if you just need to know which character sets/collations a server does or does not support. The mySQL manual does say this though: In cases where a character set has multiple collations, it might not be clear which collation is most suitable for a given application.

I just learned about ‘mysql_secure_installation’ which is a script that sets a root password for you and does some other cleanup/maintenance to the mysql server