Django creates MySQL tables with the default server encoding, but uses utf8 to query them. I'm using a legacy MySQL 4.1 database, not my choice (shared hosting). Because it had a lot of legacy-data, the default encoding for the server, their databases and the tables is latin1. Django uses a SET NAMES 'utf8' when connecting to the server. But Django does not set the Table or Column encodings to utf8. Rather, it lets MySQL choose. The combination of latin1 column encodings and a connection encoding of utf8 causes the following error:
OperationalError at /
(1267, "Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation 'like'")
Django should allow for different database encodings, through a settings variable: #952 and #2810. The default can be utf8. More importantly, the mysql driver backend should use this setting for column and database encodings. (see attached patch which is incomplete, but a start).