MySql alter table Collation

Question

create table check2(f1 varchar(20),f2 varchar(20));

creates a table with the default collation latin1_general_ci;

alter table check2 collate latin1_general_cs;
show full columns from check2;

shows the individual collation of the columns as 'latin1_general_ci'. Then what is the effect of the alter table command?

Answer 1

It sets the default collation for the table; if you create a new column, that should be collated with latin_general_ci -- I think. Try specifying the collation for the individual column and see if that works. MySQL has some really bizarre behavior in regards to the way it handles this.

Answer 2

MySQL has 4 levels of collation, server, database, table, column. If you change the collation of the server, database or table, you dont change whe setting for each column, but you change the default collations.

E.g if you change the default collation of a database, each new table you create in that database will use that collation, and if you change the default collation of a table, each column you create in that table will get that collation.