How to change collation of database, table, column?

Question

Now the database is latin1_general_ci and i want to change collation to utf8_general_ci. Is there any settings in phpmyadmin to change collation of database, table, column? rather than changing one by one.

Answer 1

You need to either convert each table individually:

ALTER TABLE mytable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8

(this will convert the columns just as well), or export the database with latin1 and import it back with utf8.

Answer 2

you can set default collation at several levels:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-syntax.html

1) client 2) server default 3) database default 4) table default 5) column