mysql

PHP and MySQL don’t just work with UTF-8. In particular, the client connection from PHP to MySQL defaults to latin1. There don’t seem to be any PHP settings to change this. On the MySQL side there are ‘default-character-set’ settings you can put in various sections of the my.cnf, but for me they didn’t seem to help.I found two ways to solve the problem. The first is to issue a mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8') immediately after every mysql_connect to manually switch the connection to utf8.

Kurzer Überblick über die Datums- und Zeit-Datentypen, die MySQL bietet:

• DATETIME: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
• DATE: YYYY-MM-DD
• TIME: HH:MM:SS
• YEAR: YYYY

http://wigwam.ma.cx/books/MySQL/Kap16.html