Are there any downside effects when changing mysql

Question

I have a table encoded in latin1 and collate latin1_bin.

In my table there is a column comments of type 'TEXT', as you know this column inherits table's encoding and collation, but from now on I should change it to be utf8 and utf8_general_ci because I'm starting to store special characters in comments.

Would it cause any downside effect if I'd use a command like the following?

alter table notebooks modify comments text CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Thank you for your answer.

Answer 1

Danger I think that ALTER will destroy existing text.

Also, ... Your 'name' looks Chinese, so I would guess that you want to store Chinese characters? In that case, you should use utf8mb4, not just utf8. This is because some of the Chinese characters take 4 bytes (and are not in the Unicode BMP).

I believe you need 2 steps:

ALTER TABLE notebooks MODIFY comments BLOB;
ALTER TABLE notebooks MODIFY comments TEXT
          CHARACTER SET utf8mb4  COLLATE utf8mb4_general_520_ci;

Otherwise the latin1 characters will be "converted" to ut8. But if you really have Chinese in the column, you do not have latin1. The 2-step alter, above, does (1) turn off any knowledge of character set, and (2) establish that the bytes are really utf8mb4-encoded.

To be safer, first do

RENAME TABLE notebooks TO old;
CREATE TABLE notebooks LIKE old;
INSERT INTO notebooks SELECT * FROM old;

Then do the two ALTERs and test the result. If there is trouble, you can RENAME to get back the old copy.

Answer 2

Specifying any collating sequence that does not involve direct integral comparison of a NATIVE character set will slow down your query. Whether it will slow it down noticeably is another issue. Looking up the ranking of this, and the ranking of that, in a table and comparing the two results is much, MUCH faster than retrieving on-disk information from a database, wouldn't you imagine?