MySQL, Altering Table from Latin-1 to UTF-8

Posted by brant on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by brant
Published on 2010-06-14T23:11:55Z Indexed on 2010/06/14 23:22 UTC
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mysql

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utf8

I would like to rid new entries into my database of Latin-1 characters and just allow UTF-8. I plan to Alter table and make the following changes:

Charset: latin1 -> utf-8

Collation: latin1_swdish_ci -> utf8_general_ci

The table in question has 1 million rows. Is this a good idea? What are the risks of doing this? What happens to data that I try to input that is not in utf-8? What happens to data that has been previously entered that is not utf-8?

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