Choosing a Database Charset and Collation: UTF-8 in MySQL (SQL Tutorial)

Choosing a database charset and collation is crucial for any developer and database administrator alike.
The displaying of database characters is directly dependant on a database charset that is set - this is why it's so important to choose a proper database character set. Watch this video and learn everything you need to know to choose a proper database character set in MySQL server!

This sql tutorial will tell you that one of the main encodings in the MySQL server world and on the web in general is UTF-8: as this sql tutorial is short but not really considered a sql tutorial for beginners (sql beginners usually wouldn't need to go so far as to change their character sets to support characters having a specific amount of bytes), this sql tutorial will let you in on a secret: the problem with UTF-8 in MySQL is that it's only able to support up to three bytes per character which means that it doesn't offer full Unicode support which can lead to data loss or even SQL security issues.

This SQL tutorial advanced will also tell you that UTF-8's failure to fully support Unicode is the real kicker - the UTF-8 encoding needs up to four bytes per character which means that if we store a character that would be considered UTF-8, but that would take more than 3 bytes of space, we'd come across an error.

To make sure that all of the databases are using the utf8mb4 character set, run such a sql query in your mysql installation:
ALTER DATABASE [your_database] CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci; (It's better to use utf8mb4_unicode_ci than utf8mb4_general_ci - we'll explain that in an upcoming SQL tutorial.)
Should you change the collation of a single table, you can use a query like so:
ALTER TABLE [your_table] CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Of course, any good sql tutorial will tell you that it's best to set the character set and collation upfront. You can do that like so:

1) When creating a database, choose the character set utf8mb4 and the collation ""utf8mb4_unicode_ci.""
2) When creating tables, consider running a query like the following:
CREATE TABLE [your_table] (
[column_list]
) [DEFAULT] CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

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