How to convert mysql database charset to utf-8

I have a vb forum with a huge amount of data

I need a way to convert this forum database tables charset with thier data from

latin1_swedish_ci to utf8-general-ci

How to do this ?

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/alter-table.html


If you want to change the table default character set and all
character columns (CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT) to a new character set, use a
statement like this:


ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET charset_name;

Follow the link for more details.

Be sure to do this in a test enviornment first. You probably wont run into many issues going from latin1 => utf8 but in general you might run into collation "weirdness" when converting charsets. This is especially true if you have any kind of unique constraints on char-ish columns.

Also keep in mind if you do have any char or varchar columns indexed moving to utf-8 will triple the amount of memory needed

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#5920, answer score: 5