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We have a very large InnoDB MySQL 5.1 database with all tables using the latin1_swedish_ci collation. We want to convert all of the data which should be in ISO-8859-1 into UTF-8. How effective would changing the collation to utf8_general_ci be, if at all?
Would we be better off writing a script to convert the data and inserting into a new table? Obviously our goal is to minimise the risk of losing any data when re-encoding.
Edit: We do have accented character’s, £ symbols etc.
If the data is currently using only latin characters and you are just wanted to change the character set and collation to UTF8 to enable future addition of UTF-8 data, then there should be no problem simply changing the character set and collation. I would do it in a copy of the table first of course.