title: "Best" MySQL Collation & Charset
body: <p>From my reading of things the current wisdom appears to be that by and large utf8 is a good/failsafe/best choice for the default charset for a mysql database.  I guess I could just accept that and live with the consequences.  However, I am wondering...</p>
  
  <p>Everything I put in my database is first encrypted and then base64 encoded.  This means that pretty much the only characters ever likely to occur in my database tables are a-z,A-Z,0-9,= etc.  I should mention that there is one column in many of my tables that contains some unencyrpted/unbase64 encoded data that contains the characters a-z,0-9 and A-Z.  I need to do case sensitive searches for rows in this column.</p>
  
  <p>Under the circumstances... - would I not see some benefits if I were to use US ASCII + ascii_bin rather than utf8?</p>
  
  <p>I'd much appreciate any advice on the issue.</p>