Question

Does anyone have any tips or gotcha moments to look out for when trying to migrate MySQL tables from the the default case-insenstive swedish or ascii charsets to utf-8? Some of the projects that I’m involved in are striving for better internationalization and the database is going to be a significant part of this change.

Before we look to alter the database, we are going to convert each site to use UTF-8 character encoding (from least critical to most) to help ensure all input/output is using the same character set.

Thanks for any help

Answer 1

Some hints:

• Your CHAR and VARCHAR columns will use up to 3 times more disk space. (You probably won’t get much disk space grow for Swedish words.)
• Use SET NAMES utf8 before reading or writing to the database. If you don’t this then you will get partially garbled characters.