Aside from increasing MySQL performance, it also makes the server more resilient and easier to extend with plugins. The fruits of the ongoing top-down reworking of the SQL parser are seen in 8.0 ...

In fact, MySQL’s utf8 only allows you to store 5.88% ((0x00FFFF + 1) / (0x10FFFF + 1)) of all possible Unicode code points. Proper UTF-8 can encode 100% of all Unicode code points. As shown above, ...