How can I change my MySQL database collation?

Usually you will be interested in changing your MySQL collation in order to solve problems with foreign character encodings. The most common case is to change your MySQL collation from latin1 to utf8. This can be done by using phpMyAdmin and following the instructions below:



1. Enter your cPanel and click on the phpMyAdmin icon in the Databases box.


2. Select the database you wish to manage from the drop-down menu on the left



3. Click on the Operations tab in the top menu of your phpMyAdmin



4. At the bottom of the page you will see the collation option. You can now select a collation from the drop down menu and click on the Go button.


Please note that after your change the collation of a database only the new tables will be created with the new collation. All other tables remain with the collation, they were initially created.



For the convenience of their customers, most web hosts have set MySQL's collation to utf8 by default. You can also benefit from this feature by joining Siteground.