Re: utf8, 4.1, and character length truncation in mysql system tables

[Gleb Paharenko]

Hello.

> Is this a known issue?

It is interesting for me. According to the:

  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-metadata.html

MySQL stores usernames in utf8. Yes, you should convert your
tables to utf8, however, in my opinion, you don't have to do
this with 'mysql' database. Could you lose the characters from the
users' names due to other reasons (wrong character set for your client
application)?

Adam Fields <fields@stripped> wrote:
> I changed the default character set on a 4.1 server to utf8.
> 
> As expected, this caused the lengths of character fields to be
> shortened, requiring alter table to be run on them to extend the
> lengths.
> 
> But I didn't expect that this would also shorten the mysql system
> tables (the "mysql" db), so that usernames for newly inserted users
> have been truncated to fit the next field lengths.
> 
> Is this a known issue?
> 
> Should I set the character set for the mysql db back to latin1?
> Running "alter table" on the mysql tables to extend all of the column
> lengths seems like a bad idea, but seems like what's recommended for
> other tables in the manual.
> 
> Also, on a related note, these are really big tables, and running
> alter table on them to modify the column lengths is taking a LOOONG
> time. Any hints on speeding this up?
> 


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