AFAICR, there is performance issues about this. Western text does not "need" this representation and thus the MySQL utf8 handling could be faster.
I was also shocked to learn this while using MySQL 5.3 (where utf8mb4 is missing), which led me to upgrade to the 5.5 alpha.
From https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode-utf8...
"The character set named utf8 uses a maximum of three bytes per character and contains only BMP characters.
As of MySQL 5.5.3, the utf8mb4 character set uses a maximum of four bytes per character supports supplemental characters"
PS. I have migrated to MariaDB. Take this chance to move away from Oracle MySQL!
AFAICR, there is performance issues about this. Western text does not "need" this representation and thus the MySQL utf8 handling could be faster.
I was also shocked to learn this while using MySQL 5.3 (where utf8mb4 is missing), which led me to upgrade to the 5.5 alpha.
From https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode-utf8...
"The character set named utf8 uses a maximum of three bytes per character and contains only BMP characters.
As of MySQL 5.5.3, the utf8mb4 character set uses a maximum of four bytes per character supports supplemental characters"
PS. I have migrated to MariaDB. Take this chance to move away from Oracle MySQL!