I recently encountered this error on Disposeamail – a free disposable email site of mine that uses MySQL heavily for storing all incoming mail through an email pipe script. I did a lot of researching, and basically, there are a few primary culprits I was able to identify that will hopefully save you some time.
MySQL Series: How to Detect UTF-8 and Multi-byte Characters
Multi-byte characters can cause quite a few headaches for the unsuspecting webmaster. Sometimes all you need to do to figure out how to fix the problem is detect which database records have UTF-8 data in them and which ones do not. If you’ve been scanning records manually, stop now. Here’s a quick query to cure [...]
MySQL Series: Return NULL Values First With Descending Order
Sometimes there are unique situations where you need to order query results by a particular field in descending order, but also need NULL values first. The default (and logical) behavior of MySQL in this case is to return NULL values last, because in descending order they have the lowest value (none). But what if you [...]
