Re: [ADMIN] what's the efficient/safest way to convert database character set ?

On Oct 17, 2013, at 3:13 PM, "Huang, Suya" <Suya(dot)Huang(at)au(dot)experian(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I’ve got a question of converting database from ascii to UTF-8, what’s the best approach to do so if the database size is very large? Detailed procedure or experience sharing are much appreciated!
>

The answer to that depends on what you mean by "ascii".

If your current database uses SQL_ASCII encoding - that's not ascii. It could have anything in there, including any mix of encodings and there's been no enforcement of any encoding, so there's no way of knowing what they are. If you've had, for example, webapps that let people paste word documents into them, you potentially have different encodings used in different rows of the same table.

If your current data is like that then you're probably looking at doing some (manual) data cleanup to work out what encoding your data is really in, and converting it to something consistent rather than a simple migration from ascii to utf8.

Cheers,
Steve