These concepts are specific to the MySQL drivers for PHP.

Queries are using the buffered mode by default. This means that query results are immediately transferred from the MySQL Server to PHP and then are kept in the memory of the PHP process. This allows additional operations like counting the number of rows, and moving (seeking) the current result pointer. It also allows issuing further queries on the same connection while working on the result set. The downside of the buffered mode is that larger result sets might require quite a lot memory. The memory will be kept occupied till all references to the result set are unset or the result set was explicitly freed, which will automatically happen during request end at the latest. The terminology "store result" is also used for buffered mode, as the whole result set is stored at once. When using libmysqlclient as library PHP's memory limit won't count the memory used for result sets unless the data is fetched into PHP variables. With mysqlnd the memory accounted for will include the full result set. Unbuffered MySQL queries execute the query and then return a resource while the data is still waiting on the MySQL server for being fetched. This uses less memory on the PHP-side, but can increase the load on the server. Unless the full result set was fetched from the server no further queries can be sent over the same connection. Unbuffered queries can also be referred to as "use result". Following these characteristics buffered queries should be used in cases where you expect only a limited result set or need to know the amount of returned rows before reading all rows. Unbuffered mode should be used when you expect larger results. Because buffered queries are the default, the examples below will demonstrate how to execute unbuffered queries with each API. query("SELECT Name FROM City", MYSQLI_USE_RESULT); if ($uresult) { while ($row = $uresult->fetch_assoc()) { echo $row['Name'] . PHP_EOL; } } ?> ]]> setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY, false); $uresult = $pdo->query("SELECT Name FROM City"); if ($uresult) { while ($row = $uresult->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) { echo $row['Name'] . PHP_EOL; } } ?> ]]>

Ideally a proper character set will be set at the server level, and doing this is described within the Character Set Configuration section of the MySQL Server manual. Alternatively, each MySQL API offers a method to set the character set at runtime. The character set should be understood and defined, as it has an affect on every action, and includes security implications. For example, the escaping mechanism (e.g., mysqli_real_escape_string for mysqli and PDO::quote for PDO_MySQL) will adhere to this setting. It is important to realize that these functions will not use the character set that is defined with a query, so for example the following will not have an effect on them: real_escape_string(); $mysqli->query("SET NAMES utf8mb4"); // Will NOT affect $mysqli->real_escape_string(); $mysqli->query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8mb4"); // But, this will affect $mysqli->real_escape_string(); $mysqli->set_charset('utf8mb4'); // But, this will NOT affect it (UTF-8 vs utf8mb4) -- don't use dashes here $mysqli->set_charset('UTF-8'); ?> ]]> Below are examples that demonstrate how to properly alter the character set at runtime using each API. Because character set names in MySQL do not contain dashes, the string "utf8" is valid in MySQL to set the character set to UTF-8 (up to 3 byte UTF-8 Unicode Encoding). The string "UTF-8" is not valid, as using "UTF-8" will fail to change the character set and will throw an error. character_set_name() . "\n"; if (!$mysqli->set_charset('utf8mb4')) { printf("Error loading character set utf8mb4: %s\n", $mysqli->error); exit; } echo 'Your current character set is: ' . $mysqli->character_set_name() . "\n"; ?> ]]> ]]>