Keep It Simple

A mixture of character sets in your database can be a real mess. Incompatible character sets tend to be terribly confusing. They might even work fine until certain characters appear in your data, at which point you’ll start getting problems in all sorts of operations (such as joins between tables). You can solve the errors only by using ALTER TABLE to convert columns to compatible character sets, or casting values to the desired character set with introducers and collate clauses in your SQL statements.