MySQL 8.0 Release Notes
MySQL 8.0 Source Code Documentation
utf8 is an alias for the
utf8mb3 character set. For more information,
see Section 10.9.2, “The utf8mb3 Character Set (3-Byte UTF-8 Unicode Encoding)”.
Note
The utf8mb3 character set is deprecated and
will be removed in a future MySQL release. Please use
utf8mb4 instead. Although
utf8 is currently an alias for
utf8mb3, at some point
utf8 will become a reference to
utf8mb4. To avoid ambiguity about the
meaning of utf8, consider specifying
utf8mb4 explicitly for character set
references instead of utf8.