Thread:Project:Support desk/Deadlock found when trying to get lock??/reply (9)

Using binary is an idea as there will be no charset conversion then when things are written into/read out of the database. Since MediaWiki internally always uses UTF-8, I think you should be able to switch from a UTF-8 collation to binary without changing any content in the DB. If you use a non-UTF-8 collation, you will have to convert your content to UTF-8 first.