MySQL Workbench Connection Encoding

Question

While testing some code I stumbled on the following MySQL error:

Error Code: 1267. Illegal mix of collations (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and ( utf8mb4_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='

I was using a WHERE statement on a standard MySQL UTF-8 collation column which contained a character using 4 bytes. Unless I misunderstood, while reading, I found the following information:

• MySQL's original UTF-8 implementation was incomplete (supporting maximum 3 bytes)
• The way to solve this is a new collation called utf8mb4 which by no means a new encoding but only used by MySQL to patch their original mistake.

On my end I see no reasons to use the original MySQL UTF-8 implementation since it's incomplete. So I did a few server side configuration to make sure all defaults were pointing to utf8mb4. Everything seemed fine but now on my application: I can use 🐼 characters in my form without having to worry about MySQL.

My problem now remains that when I connect with MySQL Workbench, it seems that the encoding is being forced to UTF-8. So even if my application works correctly, if I want to run tests directly in MySQL Workbench, I get the "Illegal mix of collation" error unless I run this fix (in Workbench) after starting the application:

SET NAMES 'utf8mb4' COLLATE 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci'

I found this old question (MySQL Workbench charset) where it seemed impossible to overwrite the setting but even after I spent too much time searching for the config, I cannot believe this is still the case??

Answer 1

For now, I'm afraid, you will have to live with that. There's a WL for MySQL to rename that encoding to utf8 (throwing out the existing 3 byte variant). So it makes sense to keep utf8 in MySQL Workbench or we have to use different settings for different servers, which makes things more complicated.