MySQL 5.6 until version 8 has quite messy utf8 charset support. For MySQL 5.6 we can use utf8 charset (alias pointing to utf8mb3 - not full utf8) with collations like utf8_general_ci (case insensitive) or utf8_bin (case sensitive), but these collations will break order by - they compare only character code points, so upper case characters will be before lower case characters. From Mysql 8, mysql team recomends charset utf8mb4. Collation for correct searches would be utf8mb4_0900_as_cs. utf8mb4 is mainly necessary for deployments with extensive use of accented characters.