title: When to use utf-8 and when to use latin1 in MySQL?
body: <p>I know that <em>MySQL</em> has default of <em>latin1</em> encoding and apparently it takes 1 byte to store a character in <em>latin1</em> and 3 bytes to store a character in <em>utf-8</em> - is that correct?</p>
  
  <p>I am working on a site that I hope will be used globally.  Do I absolutely need to have <em>utf-8</em>?  Or will I be able to get away with using latin1?</p>
  
  <p>Also, I tried to change some tables from <em>latin1</em> to <em>utf8</em> but I got this error:
  <code>Speficief key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes</code> 
  Does anyone know the solution to this?  And should I really solve that or may latin1 be enough?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,
  Alex</p>