Question

I recently realized that I made a big mistake and encoded things on the front end in UTF-8 and on the DB side to latin1.

I am thinking to switch my MySQL db to UTF-8. Is there a “good practice” of doing such a procedure? Any recommended steps I can take? What are the pitfalls I should watch out for?

Thank you,
Alex

Answer 1

The major (and most common) pitfall would be hoping that ALTER DATABASE … DEFAULT CHARACTER SET or ALTER TABLE … DEFAULT CHARACTER SET will change the encoding of the existing columns.

These statements only affect the tables and columns created after you issued these statements.

You should ALTER each table separately, using

ALTER TABLE mytable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET UTF8;