Manual:$wgDBTableOptions

Details
MySQL table options to use during installation or update. $wgDBTableOptions will be set in the LocalSettings.php file generated by the installer. You can choose one of the following options resulting in the according values:


 * MySQL binary: ENGINE=InnoDB, DEFAULT CHARSET=binary
 * MySQL UTF-8: ENGINE=InnoDB, DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

No matter which value is selected here, MediaWiki internally always produces data in UTF-8 encoding to be saved in the database. Thus a conversion is never needed. Since binary charsets prevent MySQL from doing charset conversions, which otherwise unnecessarily might take place the recommended setting is the default setting.

The following setting is no longer available in current versions due to dropped MySQL 4 support:
 * MySQL 4.0 backwards-compatible UTF-8: TYPE=InnoDB