MySQL is one of the worst offenders for broken Unicode and collation problems arising therein. Neither it nor JavaScript deserve consideration for problems that need robust Unicode handling.
I actually switched my (low traffic, low performance needs) blog comments database from MySQL to SQLite purely because I could not make MySQL and Unicode get along. All I needed was for it to accept and then regurgitate UTF-8 and it couldn't even handle that. I'm sure it can be done, but none of the incantations I tried made it work, and it was ultimately easier for me to switch databases.
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.)
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.
