MySQL Bugs: #27518: Table character set changes do not set fields, provide option or document..

Bug #27518	Table character set changes do not set fields, provide option or document..
Submitted:	29 Mar 2007 11:17	Modified:	18 Jan 2014 13:41
Reporter:	Domas Mituzas	Email Updates:
Status:	Verified	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Workbench: Administration	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	5.2	OS:	Any (any)
Assigned to:	Assigned Account	CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
MySQL Administrator allows to change table character set, but that just sets the default. 
As MySQL has 'ALTER TABLE ... CONVERT TO' syntax, utilizing it for converting all fields could be helpful. 

Ideally that could be additional checkbox in the screen, setting on/off field conversion.

How to repeat:
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Suggested fix:
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Domas,

what do you mean here exactly?

Many thanks for writing a feature request. We are on the way to implement full functionality of MySQL Administrator into MySQL Workbench. We won't add this feature into MySQL Administrator anymore.

But this feature is very interesting for MySQL Workbench as well. So I changed category here to MySQL Workbench.

The effort to add this is really high so it will need a while until you will have this functionality in Workbench.

I am pretty sure this already works with Workbench 5.2 but I will test it.

Domas,

Unfortunately this is not a bug. This is an expected behaviour.

You will find same behaviour by using plane CLI.

When you change in Workbench or whatever else the character set/collation of the table then this will execute.
ALTER TABLE t CHARACTER SET = your_wish, COLLATE=your_wish;

This is just the change of the default charset/collation of the table. Means only new columns will get this charset and all existing columns will stay on charset that they have had before.

When you want to change the character set/collation of the existing columns you need either to click onto the column collation or on CLI you need to say:

ALTER TABLE t MODIFY col varchar(100) CHARSET your_wish COLLATE your_wish;

This behaviour is by design.

Consider, also no table collation/charset will be touched by automatism when you change the database collation/charset.

Existing columns will stay as they were before until they explicit will be changed by the user.

But I totally agree here with you that this could be pointed out in our documentation a little bit better.

In both documentations. Docs from server and also docs from Workbench.

Some examples would be nice here or a big hint that changing default database or table charset/collation won't change the collation/charset of existing columns.

Changed to Workbench docs bugs as nothing to do with Connector/MXJ.

From looking at his original request what he was asking for was an ability in Administrator/Workbench to convert a table's collation (so that all columns are converted to the new collation), rather than just set the default collation. So, is it possible to do that in Workbench currently? If so, how?

This is a feature request, so marking it as such.