[Piskvorrr]

Well, you can still get bitten by "11. People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points," as well as the sets 1-8 and 32-36 (people have exactly X names at a given point in time, where X>0); that's not to mention ordering and collation (12,13,18,30). But it's definitely the easiest option, and avoids many common pitfalls (if I had a nickel for every database using latin1 + latin1_swedish_ci because that's the first charset + collation in the list, I'd have a lot of nickels).

[Mvandenbergh]

I can see 11, but as long as you're not using the name as a unique key but just as a label then the mutability, non singularity, and non-orderedness aren't such problems.

[Piskvorrr]

That makes sense - I was under the impression that you need to keep the name's history etc; even so it wouldn't be much of a problem.