Yes you are right on the 3 vs 4 octets for outside BMP, it is the 4 octet UTF8 that MySQL pre 5.5 doesnt work with. With MySQL 5.5 the full basic LAMP stack at

Yes you are right on the 3 vs 4 octets for outside BMP, it is the 4 octet UTF8 that MySQL pre 5.5 doesnt work with. With MySQL 5.5 the full basic LAMP stack at least will now handle non-BMP characters.