Utfmb4 instead of utf8mb3? (#442)

Indeed better wait for mysql 8… for long varchar and indexes you need to set row_format to dynamic:

create table my_table (
......
) row_format=dynamic;

Ref. MySQL :: MySQL 5.7 Reference Manual :: 14.11 InnoDB Row Formats

Considering the enormous number of tables in the database, it’s not very wise trying to do that by ourselves…