Rails 3: Change charset and collation of an existing mysql database

Question

Is it possible to change the charset and collation of an existing Mysql database using Rails migrations or other options ?!

What's the best way to initially configure database charset & collation ?!

Answer 1

Native query could be executed in rails migration:

def self.up
  execute "ALTER DATABASE `#{ActiveRecord::Base.connection.current_database}` CHARACTER SET charset_here COLLATE collation_here;"
end

And for initial configuration you can predefine charset and collation in your database.yml file, like this:

production:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8mb4
  collation: utf8mb4_unicode_ci