<p>Does anyone have any tips or gotcha moments to look out for when trying to migrate MySQL tables from the the default case-insenstive swedish or ascii charsets to utf-8? Some of the projects that I'm involved in are striving for better internationalization and the database is going to be a significant part of this change.</p>

<p>Before we look to alter the database, we are going to convert each site to use UTF-8 character encoding (from least critical to most) to help ensure all input/output is using the same character set.</p>

<p>Thanks for any help</p>

I am going to be going over the following sites/articles to help find an answer.
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software
UTF-8 And Unicode FAQ
Hanselminutes episode "Sorting out Internationalization with Michael Kaplan"
And I also just found a very on topic post by Derek Sivers @ O'Reilly ONLamp Blog as I was writing this out.
Turning MySQL data in latin1 to utf8 utf-8