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The Craft docs call for using utf8_unicode_ci for MySQL collation. MySQL 5.5.3 introduced support for utf8mb4_unicode_ci, which, I believe, is required to support the storage of emojis.
Does anyone have experience running Craft with the utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation? Any issues to watch out for?
When you create a database in MySQL in Craft 2, you can set the default charset and collation, so that any SQL statements that get executed that don't explicitly specify what charset/collation to use, MySQL will fall back on those.
Craft 2 will always explicitly set what to use based on what the charset and collation database config settings are set to in (by default utf8 and utf8_unicode_ci). Craft 3 does away with this and falls back on the database default.
However, if you set those config settings to utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_unicode_ci and try to install Craft 2 you'll run into errors:
CDbCommand failed to execute the SQL statement: SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1071 Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes.
Because MySQL's utf8 implementation uses 3 bytes per character and utf8mb4 uses 4-bytes, that pushes many of Craft's indexes over InnoDB's 767 byte limitation.
It's worth noting that if the only place you think you'll need 4-byte support for emojis is in a Rich Text field, then Craft will automatically HTML encode them so they fit in MySQL's 3-byte utf8 charset.
If you need them outside the context of a Rich Text field, then your best bet would be to manually set just that column's charset and encoding to use mb4 in the database directly.
It's also worth noting that the upcoming Craft 3 supports PostgreSQL where none of this matters and it just works.
