I move site to new host and get problems with mysql encoding. Their support say that i should use SET NAMES and SET CHARACTER SET in my scripts, which connect to database. What should i do? How i may make default mysql encoding to unicode?

I'm set utf8 as database encoding in phpMyAdmin, install SilverStripe, but can't use russian language cause mysql save data in wrong encoding. When i copy data from phpMyAdmin->my database->table SiteTree_Live->Content field, and try to recognize which encoding used there with one charset site, i get that it is cp1251. I think that this is their default mysql encoding, and they say that i should change way how scripts connect to database.

May be i write a bit confused message, sorry.
I should resolve this issue.

I have the same problem with hoster. Only some symbols (ш, щ) crash the output. Does anybody knows how to solve it?

The problem is that many MySQL instances use latin1 as the default client connection character set. I am not sure if this is a best practice, but my solution for this problem is to add this at the bottom of _config.php:

# Force database connection to use UTF8.
DB::connect($databaseConfig);
DB::query('set charset utf8');
DB::query('set names utf8');

I have found solution for the problem in this post
http://silverstripe.org/migrating-a-site-to-silverstripe/show/256159?start=8#post262150

I've put this file in my site's code directory, changed connection type to "UTF8MySQLDatabase", and run /dev/build/.

@Hiker, thanks. That is much nicer, because it does not prematurely open the connection to the database.