Mysql – What are the major differences between thesql5.6 and thesql 5.7

First major difference I see is that InnoDB implements row-level lock while MyISAM can do only a table-level lock. You will find better crash recovery in InnoDB. However, it doesn't have FULLTEXT search indexes until v5.6, as does MyISAM. InnoDB also implements transactions, foreign keys and relationship constraints while MyISAM does not.

The list can go a bit further. Yet, they both have their unique advantages in their favor and disadvantages against each other. Each of them is more suitable in some scenarios than the other.

So to summarize (TL;DR):

• InnoDB has row-level locking, MyISAM can only do full table-level locking.
• InnoDB has better crash recovery.
• MyISAM has FULLTEXT search indexes, InnoDB did not until MySQL 5.6 (Feb 2013).
• InnoDB implements transactions, foreign keys and relationship constraints, MyISAM does not.

According to the MySQL Documentation

Collations have these general characteristics:

Two different character sets cannot have the same collation.

Each character set has one collation that is the default collation. For example, the default collation for latin1 is latin1_swedish_ci. The output for SHOW CHARACTER SET indicates which collation is the default for each displayed character set.

There is a convention for collation names: They start with the name of the character set with which they are associated, they usually include a language name, and they end with _ci (case insensitive), _cs (case sensitive), or _bin (binary).

In cases where a character set has multiple collations, it might not be clear which collation is most suitable for a given application. To avoid choosing the wrong collation, it can be helpful to perform some comparisons with representative data values to make sure that a given collation sorts values the way you expect.

StackOverflow has a list of questions tagged utf-8 and collation

ServerFault only has one tagged utf-8 and collation

There is a website called efreedom.com that has links all around StackOverflow concerning utf8 : http://efreedom.com/Question/1-4784168/Change-Collation-Utf8-Bin-One-Go

Here is another site about collations as its place in the MySQL World : http://www.collation-charts.org/

Here is a link explaining binary collations : http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-binary-collations.html