Change collation of a MySQL table to utf8_general_cs

Question

I tried to change collation MySQL table to utf8_general_cs but got following error:

mysql> ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE 'utf8_general_cs';
ERROR 1273 (HY000): Unknown collation: 'utf8_general_cs'

I run "SHOW COLLATE" command and "utf8_general_cs" is not in the results.

What can I do now?

Answer 1

MySQL doesn't have case-sensitive Unicode collations, because it's a difficult problem. Some languages collate lower-case before upper-case, and others collate upper-case before lower-case. SQL Server tries to do case-sensitive Unicode, taking locale into consideration.

You have a couple of choices:

• use collation utf8_bin (probably the easiest)
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/adding-collation-unicode-uca.html