> I’ll make a sweeping statement here: all MySQL and MariaDB users who are currently using “utf8” should actually use “utf8mb4”. Nobody should ever use “utf8”.

> I’ll make a sweeping statement here: all MySQL and MariaDB users who are currently using “utf8” should actually use “utf8mb4”. Nobody should ever use “utf8”. I completely agree with this sentiment, although I recall being bitten by it in indexes. The article goes on to talk about how big a CHAR(1) is if its utf8 vs utf8mb4. Well, the same applies to varchars and so a varchar(64) is potentially requiring 64, 192 or 384 bytes, depending on the charset. This can bite you because the MySQL query planner limits the longest prefix used for index scans to iirc 767 or so bytes. So I migrated some columns from utf8 to utf8mb4 and suddenly my compound indices stopped being used because the varchar contents could legally exceed that maximum. Something like that.