Could be. And its weird especially when supporting all 4 bytes would be easy (so it seems). For fun I did dig around though, and found that even in the earliest

Could be. And its weird especially when supporting all 4 bytes would be easy (so it seems). For fun I did dig around though, and found that even in the earliest documentation they clearly state only supporting 3 bytes, though not why. It says this in 2005 which only justifies not supporting 5/6 bytes, but not four. So confusing: "RFC 3629 describes encoding sequences that take from one to four bytes. Currently, MySQL UTF8 support does not include four-byte sequences. (An older standard for UTF8 encoding is given by RFC 2279, which describes UTF8 sequences that take from one to six bytes. RFC 3629 renders RFC 2279 obsolete; for this reason, sequences with five and six bytes are no longer used.)" ...Wha? (2003/2005, they changed urls) - https://web.archive.org/web/20031211033604/http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Charset-Unicode.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031211033604/http://www.mysql.... - https://web.archive.org/web/20050226012911/http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-unicode.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050226012911/http://dev.mysql.... I personally think anything critical that was worth storing in a new character format still should have been properly tested and documentation consulted, that is on the end-user. Anything not critical where you wouldn't expect to care...still should have tested, but yeah that sucks.