Hello Gerd,
Thank you for responding.
I have changed the default collation (via HeidSQL) for Matomo database, but this does not resolve the error SQLSTATE[HY000] [2054] Server sent charset unknown to the client.
The Oracle MySQL Workbench for MySQl version 8 does show the error below. I do not know if that has something to do with my problem:
Friendly regards,
Simon