One of the developers at Curse was setting up a new database server today, and was trying to set all the defaults to UTF-8 for table creation/etc. While I knew about setting those, I always knew you still had to send the set names argument on your connection initialization. Well, it turns out, you don’t:
collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci character_set_server=utf8 default-character-set=utf8 init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
