Nešlo by zprovoznit UTF-8 v phpMyAdminovi. Je pro to potřebná knihovna iconv a úprava phpMyAdmin v2.3.0 confu:
// Allow charset recoding of MySQL queries, must be also enabled in language
// file to make harder using other language files than unicode.
// Default value is FALSE to avoid problems on servers without the iconv
// extension and where dl() is not supported
$cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] = TRUE;