MySQL Bugs: #28894: automatic conversion to UTF8 isn't described in chapter 10.5.4. of the manual

Bug #28894	automatic conversion to UTF8 isn't described in chapter 10.5.4. of the manual
Submitted:	5 Jun 2007 12:32	Modified:	18 Jun 2007 14:39
Reporter:	Sveta Smirnova	Email Updates:
Status:	Closed	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: Documentation	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:		OS:	Any
Assigned to:	Paul DuBois	CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
Chapter "10.5.4. Some Special Cases Where the Collation Determination Is Tricky" of the manual contains description of how MySQL resolves collation conflicts. But this page doesn't contain any information about exception made for charset UTF8. Although this information is at "10.8. UTF-8 for Metadata" page, user can find difficulties to find description of the exception.

Phrase I tell about is:

"Although automatic conversion is not in the SQL standard, the SQL standard document does say that every character set is (in terms of supported characters) a “subset” of Unicode. Because it is a well-known principle that “what applies to a superset can apply to a subset,” we believe that a collation for Unicode can apply for comparisons with non-Unicode strings."

How to repeat:
See description

Suggested fix:
Provide note about silent conversion of strings in any non-unicode charset to UTF8 cahrset/collation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/charset-collate-tricky.html page

Thank you for your bug report. This issue has been addressed in the documentation. The updated documentation will appear on our website shortly, and will be included in the next release of the relevant products.

I've updated the tricky-collation section with the automatic conversion information, and also added some details provided by Bar.