title: MySQL mixing Charset & Collations
body: <p>I read different articles and topics on this forum to help me setting up the charset &amp; collation for my database. Not sure about the choices I made. I would appreciate any comments or advice.</p>
  <p>I'm using MySQL 5.5.</p>
  <p>The database (used with PHP) will have some datas from different languages (chinese, french, dutch, Us, spanish, arabic etc..)
  I will mainly insert datas and get information from table ID'S. I won't need to full search and compare text.</p>
  <p>So here is what I've done to create my database, I decided to use <code>CHARSET utf8mb4</code> and <code>COLLATION utf8mb4_unicode_ci</code></p>
  <pre><code>ALTER DATABASE testDB CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
  </code></pre>
  <p>When I create the table:</p>
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS sector (
      idSector INT(5) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
      sectoreName VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
      PRIMARY KEY (idSector)
  ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4  AUTO_INCREMENT=0;
  </code></pre>
  <p>For some tables, I thought it was better to use <code>utf8_bin</code>
  Ex: timezone (contain 168 047 rows)</p>
  <pre><code>CREATE TABLE timezone (
    zone_id int(10) NOT NULL,
    abbreviation varchar(6) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
    time_start decimal(11,0) NOT NULL,
    gmt_offset int(11) NOT NULL,
    dst char(1) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
    KEY idx_zone_id (zone_id),
    KEY idx_time_start (time_start)
  ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8  AUTO_INCREMENT=0;
  </code></pre>
  <p>So basically I would like to know if I'm on the right or if I'm doing something that could lead to problems.</p>