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

[Pengz9]

Hi! 

Normally, people will choose "lazy" method, define default charset as 
'utf8'. But based on the information of mysql, one might be able to define at table level
as 'utf-8' instead of whole database charset. 
In normal case, only certain table or certain "col" might store 
'utf-8' data. Hence I would like to use: define table or specific 
colum as 'utf-8' when I create a table where I expect the table or 
"col" most likely hold unicode data. 

Regards 

Zhi 



Adam Fields <fields@stripped> wrote:

>On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 10:08:33PM +0300, Gleb Paharenko wrote:
>> 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)?
>
>I suppose that's possible. This was done through the stock mysql
>client, which defaults to latin1 even if you set the server character
>set to utf8 (which makes sense, as most terminals don't support utf8).
>
>Is there something else I should be doing to create new users post
>4.1?
>
>Is this behavior something I should be worried about? (I am,
>currently.)
>
>
>> 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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