[FLOW3-general] What is the correct database collation setting?

[Steffen Wickham]

Hello list,

I'm working hard on my Flow application for a long time. Now I want to
move the whole system from my pretty old Debian system to my shiny new
CentOS based virtual machine (based on nginx webserver, PHP 5.4 as FCGI
and MySQL 5.5). I already copied all files to the new server, got Flow
base distribution running but I found some strange database settings in
my MySQL database before I export them.

Long time ago, I had decided to setup everything from scratch while
upgrading my app to Flow 2.0. I chose to set up database with collation
"utf8_unicode_ci" what might be a mistake I think. Now I found some
tables which collation is set to "utf8_general_ci" and had been created
by doctrine migration during development process. Before I move my
database to the new server I think I have to fix that issue. Is there
any recommendation for the correct collation? Is it a problem to keep
one of the collation? Any hint to convert all columns to another
collation without losing special characters (especially umlauts)?

I really hope you can help me!

Yours
Steffen