Media Temple, home of the Grid Server which I wrote about here, has just posted an excellent post on their blog, titled Anatomy of MySQL on the Grid Server. It

1. Acknowledge MySQL issues in the current grid server platform.
2. Talk about their old load balancing system for MySQL, and why it did not work.
3. Discuss their new VPS based MySQL solution that will be switched on in March.

A few days ago I upgraded/emerged MySQL installation on my Unixshell Gentoo box from 4.1.14 to 4.1.19. As it emerges, it also replaced the default configuration file and now uses utf8 as the default encoding to database and client libraries. I also re-emerged dev-lang/php-5.1.4, and it turned out all my unicode on PHP sites are broken! PHP pulls junks out from the database and can’t display them. Meanwhile, anything unicode you put in there becomes a series of question marks ???? in the rendered page.