Mysql – Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,COERCIBLE) and (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation ‘find_in_set’

This is generally caused by comparing two strings of incompatible collation or by attempting to select data of different collation into a combined column.

The clause COLLATE allows you to specify the collation used in the query.

For example, the following WHERE clause will always give the error you posted:

WHERE 'A' COLLATE latin1_general_ci = 'A' COLLATE latin1_general_cs

Your solution is to specify a shared collation for the two columns within the query. Here is an example that uses the COLLATE clause:

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY key COLLATE latin1_general_ci;

Another option is to use the BINARY operator:

BINARY str is the shorthand for CAST(str AS BINARY).

Your solution might look something like this:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE BINARY a = BINARY b;

or,

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY BINARY a;

so the answer is simple. It seems you missed the change as stated by MKJ ^^ but the actual syntax to alter your tables looks like this.

alter table `dbname`.`tablename` convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;

Applied as an individual script or at the end of your create table statement you should be able to relate all related tables back to the same charset