MySQL Set Default Character Set and Collation
I am getting fed up with all the databases on my server being set to latin1 with a Swedish collation, I guess I am just being anal, anyhow. I found out how to configure MySQL so that it always uses utf8. Add the following lines to your /etc/mysql/my.cnf under the mysqld section:
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8' default-character-set=utf8 default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci character-set-server=utf8