How to change collation of database, table, column?

Question

I am contributing here, as the OP asked:

How to change collation of database, table, column?

The selected answer just states it on table level.

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Changing it database wide:

ALTER DATABASE <database_name> CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Changing it per table:

ALTER TABLE <table_name> CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Good practice is to change it at table level as it'll change it for columns as well. Changing for specific column is for any specific case.

Changing collation for a specific column:

ALTER TABLE <table_name> MODIFY <column_name> VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

You need to either convert each table individually:

ALTER TABLE mytable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 

(this will convert the columns just as well), or export the database with latin1 and import it back with utf8mb4.

You can run a php script.

               <?php
                   $con = mysql_connect('localhost','user','password');
                   if(!$con) { echo "Cannot connect to the database ";die();}
                   mysql_select_db('dbname');
                   $result=mysql_query('show tables');
                   while($tables = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
                            foreach ($tables as $key => $value) {
                             mysql_query("ALTER TABLE $value CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci");
                       }}
                   echo "The collation of your database has been successfully changed!";
                ?>

To change collation for tables individually you can use,

ALTER TABLE mytable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8

To set default collation for the whole database,

ALTER DATABASE  `databasename` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin

or else,

Goto PhpMyAdmin->Operations->Collation.

There you an find the select box which contains all the exsiting collations. So that here you can change your collation. So here after database table will follows this collation while you are creating new column . No need of select collation while creating new columns.