Ruby, Rails: mysql2 gem, does somebody use this gem? Is it stable?

Question

I found mysql2 gem. It works fine with ruby 1.9 and utf8 encoding (as opposed to mysql gem).

But I have doubts. Does somebody use this gem in production? What about

Answer 1

Make sure you convert your 'latin1' characters to 'utf8', following the answer here:

UTF8 MySQL problems on Rails - encoding issues with utf8_general_ci