Can one change MySQL's default assignment from character sets to collations?

Question

I set up a MySQL database, version 5.5.31. The default collation for the character set utf8mb4 is utf8mb4_general_ci (as shown by SHOW CHARACTER SET). I would like to change this to utf8mb4_unicode_ci.

Is there any way to change the default assignment from character sets to collations? Or is it hard-coded and compiled into the MySQL binary?

Answer 1

ALTER DATABASE db_name CHARACTER SET utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

See the reference here.