Despite the many strategies that are being promoted for optimizing MySQL 5 databases there is one basic strategy that I believe to be important, optimization with proper use of data types. Granted that other strategies are great, but they essentially rely on a database with tables designed in an intelligent fashion.
The two primary categories which I am going to focus on are Numeric Data Types and Character String Data Types for these are used most often and are usually the ones which need optimizing the most.