Collation Issue

Question

Hi If I change the table type default collation to UTF8 from latin does it slow down the queries?

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any reason it should, but the fundamental answer for something like this is really "test it and see" -- i.e. find out how long your queries are taking now, change the collation, and find out how long they're taking afterward.

Answer 2

As always with with character sets (and collation should make not much difference), it depends.

Long Answer:

If I am not mistaken (someone else might correct me), the only performance difference it could cause, would be different size of stored data. And that depends on your stored data: If you store mostly English texts, then UTF-8 strings will be the same as latin1 strings, but for languages like French, UTF-8 strings can be longer than a special character set. But this effect only makes a difference when storing Russian, Arabic, CJK etc.

Short Answer:

No.