MySQL provides a facility that allows users to specify different character sets at different levels.

create database test charset utf8;

create table test( id int, name char(100)) charset utf8;

create table test ( id int, name1 char(100) charset gbk, name2 char(100) charset utf8));

• When you specify the character set of your database as utf8mb4/utf8, the default collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci/utf8_general_ci. If you specify collation_server=utf8mb4_bin, the database interprets the data as binary. For example, specifying the CHAR column length as four means that the byte length returned is 16 (for utf8mb4) though when you try to insert data more than four bytes the target database warns that the data is too long. This is the limitation of database so Oracle GoldenGate does not support binary collation. To overcome this issue, specify collation_server=utf8mb4_bin when the character set is utf8mb4 and collation_server=utf8_bin for UTF-8.

• The following character sets are not supported:

  • armscii8
  • keybcs2
  • utf16le
  • geostd8