In MySQL, don’t use “utf8”, use “utf8mb4” (2016)

Given that the article says that everyone should use utf8mb4, then why don't/haven't they just fixed it? Should be easy enough, and probably safe, too.

Side note: It's not enough to change the encoding of the database, you need to make sure that all involved parties use the same encoding (or convert the charset at the interfaces).

For instance in a Laravel app I had to set the charset in the database configuration file "app/config/database.php".

"An optimization was chosen to limit utf8 to 3 bytes, enough to handle almost all modern languages."

I can't for the life of me imagine how, when discussing this in a room full of competent developers, everyone just went "great idea, lets do this". Just adds to the long list of questionable MySQL engineering decisions.

Possibly my favourite thing about the rise of emoji is that they’re not Basic Multilingual Plane, and so stupid hacks like MySQL’s utf8 character set (I seriously don’t know why anyone ever thought it was a good idea in 2002–2004) are now obviously insufficient for full Unicode support, and enough people care about them that adoption of this basic level of Unicode is driven, and so non-English speakers are inadvertently helped.

The next hurdle is to convince people that extended grapheme clusters are the smallest divisible unit, and that just like slicing at the byte level is insufficient if you’re doing UTF-8, slicing at the code point level is insufficient. Basically, strings should just be treated as opaque data in almost all places.

Do you have a collation were no two different strings compare equal? Have you considered imposing an arbitrary order where you don't know which one "should" go first?