[Pdns-users] gmysql: Is latin1 really necessary? What are the consequences of using UTF-8?

[Nicholas Williams]

In the past 4-5 years, I’ve gotten into the habit of defaulting all MySQL tables to this:

    DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci

Looking at the latest PowerDNS schema (I’m about to start up a second environment), I noticed that the entire schema has this:

    CHARACTER SET ‘latin1'

I did some searching through the archives, but couldn’t readily find an answer about this: Is there a specific reason why LATIN-1 was chosen and must be used? What are the consequences of using UTF-8 instead of LATIN-1?

One consequence that I know of is that `records.content` can’t be VARCHAR(64000) and also be UTF-8, so it must either be made explicitly LATIN-1, or it must be shortened to VARCHAR(16383), or it must be converted to a TEXT column. Are there are negative consequences of making it a TEXT column?

Thanks,

Nick