Before under­tak­ing such migra­tion the first step is a les­son in under­stand­ing more about how latin1 and utf8 work and inter­act in MySQL. latin1 in a com­mon and his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter set used in MySQL. utf8 first avail­able in MySQL Ver­sion 4.1 is an encod­ing sup­port­ing mul­ti­ple bytes and is the sys­tem default in MySQL 5.0 via […]

Con­tin­u­ing on from prepa­ra­tion in our MySQL latin1 to utf8 migra­tion let us first under­stand where MySQL uses char­ac­ter sets. MySQL defines the char­ac­ter set at 4 dif­fer­ent lev­els for the struc­ture of data. via Migrat­ing MySQL latin1 to utf8 – Char­ac­ter Set Options

Hav­ing cov­ered the prepa­ra­tion and char­ac­ter set options of per­form­ing a latin1 to utf8 MySQL migra­tion, just how do you per­form the migra­tion cor­rectly. Com­plete story again at Migrat­ing MySQL latin1 to utf8 – The process .

Use this method if at all pos­si­ble as it will attempt to recover non-English latin1 char­ac­ters (accents, umlauts) in your exist­ing data. Con­firm your data­base is cur­rently encoded in latin1. Make a fresh backup (ide­ally using mysql­hot­copy se notes below) Tem­porar­ily dis­able your cron­job so you don’t have any­thing try­ing to access the data­base. The steps below […]