One example of the sort of trivia that's burned into my brain: You never want to use the utf8 encoding. It's broken. What everyone else calls utf8 MySQL calls "

One example of the sort of trivia that's burned into my brain: You never want to use the utf8 encoding. It's broken. What everyone else calls utf8 MySQL calls "utf8mb4". MySQL is filled to the brim with this sort of thing.