create_engine("mysql+mysqldb://user:pass@host/dbname?charset=utf8&use_unicode=0")
-As of this writing, MySQLdb only runs on Python 2 and development has been stopped.
-`mysqlclient`_ is fork of MySQLdb and provides Python 3 support and some bugfixes.
+The ``'utf8'`` charset on MySQL only supports **up to three-byte codepoints**,
+and not four-byte codepoints as normally supported by utf8. In order to
+support all unicode codepoints, MySQL versions 5.5.3 and above
+provide a MySQL-specific encoding ``'utf8mb4'``, which supports
+codepoints up to four bytes in size::
+
+ create_engine("mysql+mysqldb://user:pass@host/dbname?charset=utf8mb4&use_unicode=0")
+
+.. seealso::
+
+ :ref:`mysql_unicode` - Includes background on the ``'utf8mb4'`` character set.
+
++Py3K Support
++------------
++
++Currently, MySQLdb only runs on Python 2 and development has been stopped.
++`mysqlclient`_ is fork of MySQLdb and provides Python 3 support as well
++as some bugfixes.
+
+ .. _mysqlclient: https://github.com/PyMySQL/mysqlclient-python
+
Known Issues
-------------