[pjscott]

As an ugly last resort, you could store Unicode as UTF-8 in BLOB fields. MySQL is pretty good about storing binary data. (I dread the day that I'll have to do something more advanced with Unicode in MySQL than just storing it.)

[mikeash]

I no longer recall whether I tried that and failed, or didn't get that far. Seems like a semi-reasonable approach if you don't need the database to be able to understand the contents of that column. But on the other hand, SQLite is working great for my needs too.