MySQL 8 with utf8mb4

[Austin]

Hello Sakai Devs,

We are planning to upgrade to MySQL 8 and also enable uft8mb4 soon.  Is there any official documentation or does anyone have any notes on their experience with either or both?  I see that there are nightly QA servers on MySQL 8.  Are the nightlies also using utf8mb4?

I've also seen comments here and in some JIRAs (linked to SAK-31945) that others have upgraded to utf8mb4.

Our plan is to:

• switch database to using per-file tablespace (from system tablespace)
• all tables switched to using utf8mb4
• all FK recreated when switched to utf8mb4
• indexes of "large" tables to be recreated. e.g. content_resource

Also this jira's comment mentions using character_set_server=utf8mb4 in the connection string.  Currently we use characterEncoding=UTF-8.  Which connection string option is correct/preferred?

Should we also start tomcat with any encoding options? e.g. file.encoding=UTF-8?

If anyone has any additional suggestions, that would be awesome!

Thanks,

Austin