KeithW, education about database server configuration and migration between environments is far beyond the scope of what we can reasonably provide in terms of documentation. I think it would be quite off-putting to most new users to see a chapter dealing with this, thinking that it was indicative of the required knowledge to use ExpressionEngine.
Budget hosts have blurred the line somewhat between the web developer and server admin, making the former capable of doing some basic tasks of the latter, but the truth of the matter is we (web developers) should know and rely upon a server admin who is equally skilled in their industry as we are in ours to configure our environments for us and work with our data. They really are separate industries and each require years of experience and an abundance of knowledge that can’t be sufficiently gained form a discussion in a software user manual. So, in the same way that we do not teach and train on topics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript usage, we also do not teach and train MySQL database management.
Thankfully, advancing technology continues to simplify things, and Ingmar’s comment to one of the above threads holds out hope that will make some, but not all, of these issues less of an ordeal.
With the universal advent of utf-8, we’re slowly fading them out.
