MySQL и кодировка...

Читать внимательнее надо
~/INSTALL-SOURCE

* By default, *MySQL* uses the ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) character set. To change the default set, use the `--with-charset' option: shell> ./configure --with-charset=CHARSET `CHARSET' may be one of `big5', `cp1251', `cp1257', `czech', `danish', `dec8', `dos', `euc_kr', `gb2312', `gbk', `german1', `hebrew', `hp8', `hungarian', `koi8_ru', `koi8_ukr', `latin1', `latin2', `sjis', `swe7', `tis620', `ujis', `usa7', or `win1251ukr'. *Note Character sets::. If you want to convert characters between the server and the client, you should take a look at the `SET OPTION CHARACTER SET' command. *Note `SET OPTION': SET OPTION. *Warning:* If you change character sets after having created any tables, you will have to run `myisamchk -r -q' on every table. Your indexes may be sorted incorrectly otherwise. (This can happen if you install *MySQL*, create some tables, then reconfigure *MySQL* to use a different character set and reinstall it.)