Mysql server does not support 4-byte encoded utf8 characters

Question

I've received a server error running a Data transfer component from Sql Server to MySql db. The error message reads as follows:

[MySql][ODBC 5.1 Driver][mysqld-5.0.67-community-nt-log]Server does not support 4-byte encoded UTF8 characters.

The source Sql Server table contains nvarchar columns, the target MySql table contains varchar columns.

Can anybody shed some light on this problem?

Answer 1

If you need MySQL to support 4-byte UTF-8 characters (which is normally considered part of UTF-8), you need to use the character set utf8mb4, not utf8. utf8mb4 was first supported in MySQL 5.5.3.