Unicode Support | information_schema | +--------------------+ mysql>  SELECT SCHEMA_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA WHERE SCHEMA_NAME = ’INFORMATION_SCHEMA’; +--------------------+ | SCHEMA_NAME | +--------------------+ | information_schema | +--------------------+ 10.9 Unicode Support The Unicode Standard includes characters from the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and supplementary characters that lie outside the BMP. This section describes support for Unicode in MySQL. For information about the Unicode Standard itself, visit the Unicode Consortium website. BMP characters have these characteristics: •Their code point values are between 0 and 65535 (or  U+0000  and  U+FFFF ). •They can be encoded in a variable-length encoding using 8, 16, or 24 bits (1 to 3 bytes). •They can be encoded in a fixed-length encoding using 16 bits (2 bytes). •They are sufficient for almost all characters in major languages. Supplementary characters lie outside the BMP: •Their code point values are between  U+10000  and  U+10FFFF ). •Unicode support for supplementary characters requires character sets that have a range outside BMP characters and therefore take more space than BMP characters (up to 4 bytes per character). The UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format with 8-bit units) method for encoding Unicode data is implemented according to RFC 3629, which describes encoding sequences that take from one to four bytes. The idea of UTF-8 is that various Unicode characters are encoded using byte sequences of different lengths: •Basic Latin letters, digits, and punctuation signs use one byte. •Most European and Middle East script letters fit into a 2-byte sequence: extended Latin letters (with tilde, macron, acute, grave and other accents), Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and others. •Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ideographs use 3-byte or 4-byte sequences. MySQL supports these Unicode character sets: • utf8mb4 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to four bytes per character. • utf8mb3 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to three bytes per character. • utf8 : An alias for  utf8mb3 . • ucs2 : The UCS-2 encoding of the Unicode character set using two bytes per character. • utf16 : The UTF-16 encoding for the Unicode character set using two or four bytes per character. Like ucs2  but with an extension for supplementary characters. • utf16le : The UTF-16LE encoding for the Unicode character set. Like  utf16  but little-endian rather than big-endian. 1962