> You should just always be explicit. I generally agree. Note: I think if you leave out any specific encoding configuration from your my.cnf, mysql implicitly

> You should just always be explicit. I generally agree. Note: I think if you leave out any specific encoding configuration from your my.cnf, mysql implicitly goes with latin1. For users who are assuming a modern unicode/utf8 default setup, might be nice if the mysql folks would require an explicit config for this setting.