During installation, to ensure that the database uses unicode, there is a check to make sure that the database is using UTF8; however, the current check returns the collation default for the MySQL server rather than the particular database. As a result, if a hosted website by default uses latin1 but the user creates a utf8 database they still cannot install Moodle.

After researching the issue, I discovered that in MySQL 5.0.6 it became possible to check the collation of a particular database and I think we should use that rather than then previous method to help avoid issues on hosted sites. I am attaching the PMA_getDbCollation function used by phpMyAdmin to show how things work.

In essence I am proposing that if the database is MySQL 5.0.6 and greater that we use:

SELECT DEFAULT_COLLATION_NAME
FROM information_schema.SCHEMATA
WHERE SCHEMA_NAME = 'database_name';

rather than SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_database';

Peace - Anthony