Q: MySQL 4 utf8 charset support.

A: For MySQL 4.1 or later, if you want UTF-8 support, you must create the bugzero database use
   the utf8 charset or must alter the database before any bugzero tables were created there.
   Below is the command:

   mysql> CREATE DATABASE bugzero_db CHARACTER SET utf8;

   or, if you create the database without the character set, you can alter it bt

   mysql> ALTER DATABASE bugzero_db CHARACTER SET utf8;

   After alter your database charset, you will need remove all the tables and re-create them
   (or do alter table table_name character set utf8).
 
   Of course, if you are aready using utf8 as the default charset for the mysql server, then
   you do not need do anything to the bugzero_db database. Also note that, this is only for
   MySQL 4.1 or later.

   Data Migration issues:
   If you are migrating from Mysql 4 to later versions using mysqldump, the table charset may
   not match to the database charset. Use

   mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE `project`;

   to find out the charset for the tables. If they are different from the database charset, you
   may have a problem:

   1. Query results become case-sensitive.
   2. Problem in saving unicode characters, errors like
      java.sql.SQLException: General error message from server:
      "Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='"

   To fix the problem, you can do

   mysql> ALTER TABLE table_name CHARACTER SET utf8;

   for all the tables. That might just solve the problem.
   Otherwise, you can also re-import the database, using the right mysqldump option:

   --default-character-set=utf8

* Reference brought to you by Bugzero, it's more than just bug tracking software!
http://www.websina.com/bugzero/faq/mysql-utf8.html