The best collation for your database

I still remember the first database I created in mySQL - the default was "latin1_swedish _ci". I didn't even pay attention to that, thinking that whatever default there was would be correct for use by everyone. Wrong I was.

Everything worked great until I needed French accents and German umlauts and SZ. Then the nightmare of bulk importing/exporting data from it. Discovered UTF-8 heaven. A limited heaven, as now I have to store Russian, Thai and Chinese characters.

Save yourself all the headaches and for your MariaDB you can use "utf8mb4_unicode_ci", which supports virtually all languages plus emojis, Asian languages and mathematical symbols.