Thread:Project:Support desk/Database "ENGINE=MyISAM, DEFAULT CHARSET=binary" help/reply (4)

For MediaWiki, the difference mainly is whether we need to do charset conversions: MediaWiki internally always uses UTF-8, but both, UTF-8 and binary encoding, will make it so that no charset conversion will be needed. Binary has the advantage, that data inside binary fields - from the perspective of MySQL - has no charset. That means MySQL won't even think about doing any conversions on it.

The table "searchindex" is the only one, which cannot be converted to binary; it should still be UTF-8. Here is the source code for the table creation:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/MW/browse/master/maintenance/tables.sql