When computers were still using large black text oriented screens or no screens at all, a computer only knew how to store a limited set of characters. Then it was normal to store a name with the more complicated characters replaced by more basic characters. The ASCII standard was used to make communication between multiple systems (or applications) easier. Storing characters as ASCII needs little space and is quite strait forward. Then DOS used CP850 and CP437 and so on to make it possible to use language /location specific characters. Then ISO8859-1 , ISO8859-15 and more of these character sets were defined as standard. And now there is Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS2, etc. which allow you to store many different kinds of characters in the same character set. But all those character sets only work correctly if you configure all applications correctly. Many of the character sets are very similar and seem to work correctly even if one of the systems is not correctly configured. If...

The recently released TokuDB brings many features. One of those features is support for XA Transactions. InnoDB already has support for XA Transactions. XA Transactions are transactions which span multiple databases and or applications. XA Transactions use 2-phase commit, which is also the same method which MySQL Cluster uses. Internal XA Transactions are used to keep the binary log and InnoDB in sync. Demo 1: XA Transaction on 1 node: mysql55-tokudb6> XA START 'demo01'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) mysql55-tokudb6> INSERT INTO xatest(name) VALUES('demo01'); Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec) mysql55-tokudb6> SELECT * FROM xatest; +----+--------+ | id | name | +----+--------+ | 3 | demo01 | +----+--------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) mysql55-tokudb6> XA END 'demo01'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) mysql55-tokudb6> XA PREPARE 'demo01'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) mysql55-tokudb6> XA COMMIT 'demo01...