I had a MariaDB schema which was using utf8_general_ci. I noticed that when I tried entering russion text, characters were being changed to question marks (?).
I therefore changed the collations to utf8_unicode_ci and this worked on my local machine. However, when I exported the schema with the new collation and ran it over on my Amazon EC2 instance, characters are still being changed to question marks.
I verified that these schemas are exactly the same since on EC2 I dropped the DB and recreated it after exporting my local SQL schema (with the new collation).
I can't figure out why this is working on my local machine but no on EC2. Any ideas?