Re: [Semediawiki-user] error in Special:Types page

[S P. <in...@sk...>]

Stefano Costa wrote:
> I have upgraded to SMW 1.0RC3, and the Special:Types page gives me this
> error:
> 
> 1267: Illegal mix of collations (latin1_bin,IMPLICIT) and
> (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation
> 'UNION' (sql.archeologiabizantina.it)

I've never seen it.

Maybe you changed your MySQL settings or version between your install of 
0.7 and of 1.0RC3, such that when the admin script updated your wiki 
database you wound up with this "illegal mix of collations".

For what it's worth, all my SMW tables have Collation 
latin1_general_ci, but I started with SMW 0.3 on old PHP and MediaWiki. 
  SMW_SQLStore doesn't set a collation.

Read http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset.html
You could dump your SMW tables, then try altering the table collation. 
phpMyAdmin's Operations tab lets you change the collation of a table; I 
don't see any IMPLICIT or COERCIBLE there.

If that doesn't work, drop all the SMW tables and run SMW admin to 
recreate.  Then if you run SMW_refreshData.php twice it should re-add 
information to the tables, or if that doesn't work reload the data.

If you have a lot of special or accented characters, the change in 
collation might garble the characters or sort order in obscure 
circumstances. :-(

My educated guess is there would be some benefit for the connection 
collation and character set, client collation and character set, 
database character set, and per-table collation to match, so the 
database doesn't have to perform character set gyrations to convert and 
sort results.  When I first installed SMW, some part of the 
SMW/MediaWiki/PHP/MySQL stack recommended against UTF-8 encoding.  I 
think that recommendation is gone but I'm not sure what the current 
recommendation is.

I hope this helps,
--
=S