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 …

The world is moving to UTF8, MySQL 8.0 has utf8mb4 charset as default now, but, to be honest, I was pretty surprised how sensible the "charset" related topic could be.. -- in fact you may easily hit huge performance overhead just by using an "odd" config settings around your client/server charset and collation. While to avoid any potential charset mismatch between client and server, MySQL has from a long time an excellent option : "skip-character-set-client-handshake" which is forcing any client connection to be "aligned" with server settings ! (for more details see the ref. manual : https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_character-set-client-handshake) -- this option is NOT set by default (to leave you a freedom in choose of charsets used on client and server sides). However, in my …

In MySQL 8.0 our plan is to drastically improve support for utf8. While utf8 support itself dates back to MySQL 4.1, there exist some limitations. The “sushi = beer” problem in the title refers to Bug #76553. Sushi and beer don’t even go well together, at least not to my taste:-) I will use this bug as an example to explain issues with utf8 collations in the past and our plans for utf8 support going forward.…

In Python it is easily possible to findout the name of a Unicode character and findout some properties about that character. The module which does that is called unicodedata.

An example:

>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.name('☺')
'WHITE SMILING FACE'

This module uses the data as released in the UnicodeData.txt file from the unicode.org website.

So if UnicodeData.txt is a 'database', then we should be able to import it into MySQL and use it!

I wrote a small Python script to automate this. The basic steps are:

• Download UnicodeData.txt
• Create a unicodedata.ucd table
• Use LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE to load the data

This isn't difficult especially because the file doesn't have the actual characters in it. It is …

In MySQL Character encoding – part 1 we stated that the myriad of ways in which character encoding can be controlled can lead to many situations where your data may not be available as expected.

UTF8 was designed on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.

Setting MySQL Client and Server Character encoding.

Lets restart MySQL with the correct setting for our purpose, UTF8. Here we can see the setting in the MySQL configuration file, in this case /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

character-set-server = utf8

This change is then reflected in the session and global variables once the instance is restarted with the new configuration parameter.

mysql> SELECT …

Breaking and unbreaking your data

Recently at FOSDEM, Maciej presented “Breaking and unbreaking your data”, a presentation about the potential problems you can incur regarding character encoding whilst working with MySQL. In short, there are a myriad of places where character encoding can be controlled, which gives ample opportunity for the system to break and for text to become unrecoverable.

The slides from the presentation are available on slideshare.

Character Encoding – MySQL DevRoom – FOSDEM 2015 from …

Here’s a problem some or most of us have encountered. You have a latin1 table defined like below, and your application is storing utf8 data to the column on a latin1 connection. Obviously, double encoding occurs. Now your development team decided to use utf8 everywhere, but during the process you can only have as little to no downtime while keeping your stored data valid.

CREATE TABLE `t` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `c` text,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
master> SET NAMES latin1;
master> INSERT INTO t (c) VALUES ('¡Celebración!');
master> SELECT id, c, HEX(c) FROM t;
+----+-----------------+--------------------------------+
| id | c               | HEX(c)                         |
+----+-----------------+--------------------------------+
|  3 | ¡Celebración!   | C2A143656C656272616369C3B36E21 |
+----+-----------------+--------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
master> SET …

As I wrote in a previous post, MariaDB / MySQL has some issues with the standard UTF-8 encoding there. This UTF-8 encoding limits us to 3 UTF-8 bytes or 2 UNICODE bytes if you want to look at it that way. This is slightly limiting, but for languages it is usually pretty much OK, although there are some little used languages in the 3 byte UNICODE range. But in addition to languages, you will be missing symbols, such as smileys!

Help is on the way though, in the utf8mb4 character set that is part of both MariaDB and MySQL. This is a character set that is just like the one just called utf8, except this one accepts all the UNICODE characters with up to 3 UNICODE bytes, or 4 bytes using the UTF-8 encoding.

This means that there are more limits to how long a column might be when using utf8mb4 compared …

UNICODE is getting more and more traction and most new applications, at least web applications, support UNICODE. I have written about UNICODE and related stuff before in Character sets, Collations, UTF-8 and all that but before I go into some more specific and some issues, and fixes, let me tell you about UNICODE, UTF-8 and how MySQL interprets it. See the blogpost linked to above for more information on the subject, surprisingly even more boring, on Collations.

So, let's begin with UNICODE. UNICODE is a character set that is very complete, you should be able to make yourself understood in any language using the characters from this vast character set. This is not to say that all characters from all languages are in UNICODE, some are missing here and there and sometimes new characters make their way into …

The ALTER TABLE statement syntax is explained in the manual at:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/alter-table.html

To put it simply, there are two ways you can alter the table to use a new character set.

1. ALTER TABLE tablename DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

This will alter the table to use the new character set as the default, but as a safety mechanism, it will only change the table definition for the default character set. That is, existing character fields will have the old character set per column. For example:

mysql> create table mybig5 (id int not null auto_increment primary key,      
    -> subject varchar(100) ) engine=innodb default charset big5;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.81 sec)

mysql> show create table …