Improved support for character set handling was added to MySQL in version 4.1. This support enables you to store data using a variety of character sets and perform comparisons according to a variety of collations. You can specify character sets at the server, database, table, and column level. MySQL supports the use of character sets for the MyISAM, MEMORY, and (as of MySQL 4.1.2) InnoDB storage engines. The ISAM storage engine does not include character set support; there are no plans to change this, because ISAM is deprecated.

Note: The NDBCluster storage engine in MySQL 4.1 (available beginning with MySQL 4.1.3-Max) provides limited character set and collation support; see Section 15.11, “Known Limitations of MySQL Cluster”.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

Character set issues affect data storage, but also communication between client programs and the MySQL server. If you want the client program to communicate with the server using a character set different from the default, you'll need to indicate which one. For example, to use the utf8 Unicode character set, issue this statement after connecting to the server:

SET NAMES 'utf8';

For more information about character set-related issues in client/server communication, see Section 10.4, “Connection Character Sets and Collations”.