The day I realized that is the day I stopped using MySQL. It was a very long time ago, I was burned by this exact issue. I don't know what's more fundamental to

The day I realized that is the day I stopped using MySQL. It was a very long time ago, I was burned by this exact issue. I don't know what's more fundamental to a database than storing the data you ask it to. If it's storing something else, then it failed at its job spectacularly. At the time I experienced this bug I think it didn't even give a warning, but I think that's actually worse with one : it knows it's storing incorrect data but does so anyways. And it still has not been fixed after all those years. I don't know what use is a character encoding that partially supports Unicode (you just have to try to find out in what way) and is used by nobody else. I don't really care that at some point in the future utf8 is going to become an alias to utf8mb4, a DB capable of this behaviour cannot be trusted, and it allowed me to discover postgres which seems superior in just about every way, so I don't need to go back.