How to change table’s collation in MySQL
Thursday, January 29th, 2009You can easily change collation with an ALTER TABLE … CONVERT statement. For example:
alter table book_category convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci;
Note, that it is not equivalent to
alter table book_category default collate utf8_unicode_ci;
which only changes a default collation, so the existing columns preserve their collation.