Character Sets and Collations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 245

Effective Character Sets and Collations
phpMyAdmin picks the 'effective' character set—the one that best fits our selected
language (which obviously is the one we want to see in our browser). For example,
we will see the following on the Home page:
The character set information (as seen here after MySQL charset ) is passed to
the MySQL server. MySQL then transforms the characters that will be sent to our
browser into this character set. MySQL also interprets what it receives from the
browser according to the character set information. Remember that all tables and
fields have a character set information describing how their data is encoded.
We can also choose which character set and collation will be used for our connection
to the MySQL server using the MySQL connection collation dialog. Normally, the
default value should work, but if we are entering some characters using a different
character set, we can choose the proper character set in this dialog.
The following parameter defines the default connection collation:
$cfg['DefaultConnectionCollation'] = 'utf8_unicode_ci';