Character sets and collations in MySQL

This post provides a deep dive into MySQL character sets and collations, explaining their definitions, how to query them, and the critical differences between `utf8` and `utf8mb4`. It details how to define character sets and collations at various levels (column, table, server) and illustrates the impact of different collation suffixes (`_ai`, `_ci`, `_bin`, etc.) on string comparisons. The post also touches upon MySQL's spatial data types and functions for handling geographic data, integrating this with PlanetScale's database management features.