title: Should I migrate a MySQL database with a latin1_swedish_ci collation to utf-8 and, if so, how?
body: <p>The MySQL database used by my Rails application currently has the default collation of <code>latin1_swedish_ci</code>.  Since the default charset of Rails applications (including mine) is UTF-8, it seems sensible to me to use the <code>utf8_general_ci</code> collation in the database.</p>
  
  <p>Is my thinking correct?  </p>
  
  <p>Assuming it is, what would be the best approach to migrate the collation <em>and all the data in the database</em> to the new encoding?  </p>