09 April 2025, 22:44

We've got an old mysql db which seems to have found itself using a bit of utf8mb3 and utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci. I think I want to make sure it's all doing the same thing. What's the preferred encoding for Mahara in MySQL? I presume it's utf8mb4_unicode_ci - the same as Moodle.

10 April 2025, 13:12

Hi Mark

I prefer to make my MySQL databases with the following:

create database `mahara` character set UTF8mb4 collate utf8mb4_bin;

So it handles everything in a binary way so that character casing is taken into account.

Cheers

Robert

10 April 2025, 20:26

Ah ok, so Mahara has an expectation of case-sensitivity and explicitly handles case insensitivity when it needs to. I think I tried utf8mb4_bin on a Moodle site once and got weird behaviour.