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- MySQL example: for MySQL there is one thing called Collation, which decides about the correct ordering of chars in table values. The default was `latin1_swedish_ci` for years, not `utf8_unicode_ci` which might be more sensible.

- Postgres Example: to set up Postgres correctly, you need a Postgres user in the OS, who runs the database. That should enforce to not run the database process as root.

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I spent this past week learning/solving this very issue. MySQL's utf8 character set doesn't actually include _all_ utf8 characters. Use utf8mb4 instead. Same goes for collation; use utf8mb4_unicode_ci.

The good news is they are changing the defaults in 5.8: http://mysqlserverteam.com/sushi-beer-an-introduction-of-utf...

Thanks for sharing this. I looked it up on SO [1] and since I'm from Germany, I'll stay with utf8_unicode_ci.

> For examples, the Unicode collation sorts "ß" like "ss", and "Œ" like "OE" as people using those characters would normally want, whereas utf8mb4_general_ci sorts them as single characters (presumably like "s" and "e" respectively).

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/766996/104959

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