AWS RDS MySQL with Unicode

Question

I'm running MySQL on AWS RDS, does anyone know how to set the character set there to UTF-8?

Answer 1

You can modify the database parameters through the AWS GUI/CLI or you can just create your tables with the required character set. (The Table character set does not need to match your database character set, nor match your column's character set)

E.g.

CREATE TABLE t1
(
    c1 CHAR(10) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4
) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Here I've used utf8mb4, which supports the full Unicode set, including Emojis, which MySQL's utf8 does not.