About using UTF-8 fields in MySQL

Joshua Thijssen writes; I sometimes hear: “make everything utf-8 in your database, and all will be fine”. This so-called advice could not be further from the truth. Indeed, it will take care of internationalization and code-page problems when you use UTF-8, but it comes with a price, which may be too high for you to pay, especially if you have never realized it’s there..Indexing is everything… or at least.. good indexing makes or breaks your database. The fact remains: the smaller your indexes, the more index records can be loaded into memory and the faster the searches will be. So using small indexes pays off. Period. But what has got this to do with UTF-8?

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Migrating MySQL latin1 to utf8 – Preparation

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Migrating MySQL latin1 to utf8

Before undertaking such migration the first step is a lesson in understanding more about how latin1 and utf8 work and interact in MySQL. latin1 in a common and historical character set used in MySQL. utf8 first available in MySQL Version 4.1 is an encoding supporting multiple bytes and is the system default in MySQL 5.0

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