The utf8mb4 character set is the new default as of MySQL 8.0, and this change neither affects existing data nor forces any upgrades.
Migration to utf8mb4 has many advantages including:
- It can store more symbols, including emojis
- It has new collations for Asian languages
- It is faster than utf8mb3
Still, you may wonder how migration affects your existing data. This blog covers multiple aspects of it.
Storage Requirements
As the name suggests, the maximum number of bytes that one character can take with character set utf8mb4 is four bytes. This is larger than the requirements for utf8mb3 which takes three bytes and many other MySQL character sets.
Fortunately, utf8mb3 is a subset of …
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